OLD LOVE STORIES RETOLD 










The Second Meeting of Dante and Beatrice 




Old 

Love Stories 

Retold 




By 
Richard Le Gallienne 



Author of 

" The Qjtest of the Golden Girl," " How to 

Get the Best Out of Books" "An 

Old Country House" 

etc., etc. 



New Tork 
The Baker & Taylor Co. 

33-37 East 17th Street 
(Union Sq., N .) 



Copyright, 1904, by The Baker &• Taylor Co. 

'Aucassinand Nicolete," copyright, 1901, by Cosmopolitan Magazine Co. 

' Dante and Beatrice," "Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope Devereux," 

" Heine and Mathilde," " La Salle and Helen von Donniges," 

copyright, 1002, by Cosmopolitan Magazine Co. 



"Shelley and Mary Godwin," copyright, 1903 
Cosmopolitan Magazine Co. 



by 



.©"5" 



Published, October, 11XH 



LIBR*bv * Q0N6RFSSJ 

tVw> Owes ffmwiviH) 

OCT 6 1904 

Cooyrlgrht Entrv 
Jk^ 2.1, /<?O.L/ 
<JLAS<S Ct_ xXo. No 

COPY B J 



The Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass.. U. S. A. 




I 

CONTENTS 



and Ilea /rice 



II 



assin and Nicolete 



III 



Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope 
Devereux 

IV 

Shelley and Mary Godwin 



John Keats and Fanny Brawne 
VI 



Heine and Malhilde 

VII 

Ferdinand Lassalle and Helen eon 
Don n icfes 

VIII 

Abelard and Heloise 

[5] 



29 

44 
66 

85 
101 

122 
161 



The writer desires to thank Mr. John Brisben 
Walker for his kindness in allowing him to re- 
print six of the following stories, which originally 
appeared in The Cosmopolitan. The papers on 
"Abelard and Heloise" and " Keats and Fanny 
Brawne" have not been printed before. 




Salutation of Beatrice 
Dante's Dream 

Dante on the Anniversary of Beatrice's 

Death 24 

Nicolete Weighs How She Mai/ Escape 

from the Tower 36 ^ 

Aucassin Finds Nicolete in a Bower 
in the Wood 40 

Portrait of Sidney in Armor .Y> 

Sidney's Birthplace GO 

P ere I/ Bysshe Shelley 08 

Field Place, Sussex. TJie Poet's Birth- 
place 70 

John Keats 92 

I Din rich Heine 1 L2 

Ferdinand Lassalle 148 

m 






To my friend 
Charles Hanson Towne 



o:,D LOVE STORIES RETOLD 



Dante and Beatrice 

THE great historic love stories of the world 
are like the great classics of art and litera- 
ture. They have become universal symbols of 
human experience. There are many ways of 
loving, many shapes of story taken by the fate- 
ful passion of love in a difficult world, which, 
though it may love a lover, seldom shows its love 
in the form of active sympathy while the story 
is in the making. The great love stories fix 
either the type of loving after the manner of one 
or another temperament, or the type of dramatic 
expression imposed upon love by circumstance. 
Thus the story of Tristram and Iseult stands for 
a love irresistibly passionate, stormily sensual, 
a very madness of loving. It represents a quality 
of, a way of, loving. The significance of the 
[9] 





Old Love Stories Retold 
story of Paolo and Francesca, on the 
other hand, is less in the love of the lovers 
themselves than in the shape of destiny 
which it took under the pressure of cir- 
cumstance. Lanciotto is no less impor- 
tant, is even more important, to the story 
than the lovers themselves, whereas in 
the case of Tristram and Iseult we never 
give a second thought to King Mark. 
Our eyes are held by the spectacle of the 
superb passion of the lovers, as by some 
awe-inspiring display of the elements. 
The love of Paolo and Francesca, how- 
ever, strikes no individual characteristic 
note — the lovers themselves have no 
personality — and it is merely one of 
the elements in the making of a pic- 
turesque shape of tragedy, a shape which, 
before and since, love-history has been 
constantly taking, and to which in the 
case of Paolo and Francesca the genius 
of a great poet has given an accidental 
immortality. 



Dante's own love-story belongs to the 




10 




Da lite and Beatrice 
first, more significant, class. His love 
for Beatrice is important because it stands 
for a way of loving. As many have loved 
and still go on loving the way of Tristram 
and Iseult, so many have loved and still 
go on loving Dante's way, though such a 
fashion of loving is perhaps less common. 
Yet, is it so rare, after all, for a man to 
carry enshrined in his heart from boyhood 
to manhood, and on to old age, the holy 
face of some little girl seen for a brief 
while in the magic dawn of life, lost al- 
most as soon as seen, yet seen in that 
short moment with such an ecstasy of 
sight as to become for him a deathless 
angel of the imagination, a lifelong dream 
to keep pure the heart ? 

A poet's love is apt to be a lonely, sub- 
jective passion, even when it is returned; 
for the woman whom the poet loves is 
often as much his own creation as one of 
his own poems. Like Pygmalion he 
loves the work of his own dreams. But 
never was any poet's love — not even that 

11 





Old Love Stories Retold 
of John Keats for Fanny Brawne — so entirely 
one-sided as that of Dante for Beatrice. Save 
as the object of Dante's worship, Beatrice has 
no share in the story at all. She seems to have 
had no more care for Dante's love, and indeed to 
have been hardly more aware of its existence, 
than a new star has care for, or is aware of, its 
discoverer. "The beloved," says Hafiz, "is in 
no need of our imperfect love." Dante was free 
to worship her afar off if he pleased. It was 
not her fault if she preferred the less portentous 
attentions of the society young fellows of her set. 
A lover like Dante might well bewilder, and even 
alarm, a young miss, whose thoughts, for all her 
mystical beauty, ran — innocently and properly 
enouo-h — on her sweetmeats and her next dance. 
But, if that saying of Hafiz be true, it is open to 
the retort that a lover like Dante can dispense 
with a return of his affection. All he asks is to 
dream his dream. To have his love returned 
might be disastrous to his dream. It is no mere 
flippancy to suppose that had Dante had fuller 
opportunities of knowing the real earth-born 
Beatrice, the divine Beatrice would have been 
[12] 




Sal illation of Beatrice 



Dante and Beatrice 
lost to him and to us. Fortunately, their inter- 
course seems to have been of the slightest. For 
Beatrice Dante was hardly more than an ac- 
quaintance, who, after the fashion of his day, 
paid court to her in sonnet and ballata — forms 
of devotion at that time hardly so serious as a 
serenade. For it was the period of the courts 
and colleges of love, when a poet might write in 
the name of a strictly poetical " mistress," with 
hardly more thought of scandalous realities be- 
hind his song than if to-day a poet should dedi- 
cate his new volume, by permission, to some 
noble lady. Dante's uniquely beautiful record 
of his love-story, the " Vita Nuova," is cast in 
just that formal fanciful mould of literary and 
mystical love-making which was then fashionable, 
and were it not that the form of it is quite power- 
less to suppress the intense sincerity and youth- 
ful freshness of an evidently real feeling, it might 
have passed for a brilliant piece of troubadour 
make-believe. As it is, however, the very arti- 
ficiality of the form is turned to account, and 
seems rather to accentuate than detract from the 
impression of youthful ecstasy. Young love is 
[13] 






Old Love Stories Retold 
ever curious to invent some form of ex- 
quisite ritual for the expression of its wor- 
ship. Common words are not rare 
enough for the fastidious young priest 
who thus bows his head in the awful 
sanctuary of his first love. So the very 
artifice with which in the " Vita Nuova " 
we see Dante delighting to fret little 
golden " chambers of imagery " for the 
honey, and delicate lachrimatories for 
the sorrow, of his love, is in itself an 
added touch of reality. 

Very youthful and lover-like is the 
vein of mystical superstition which runs 
through the confession, as, for example, 
the insistence on the number nine in the 
opening sentences and throughout. Not 
without hidden significance, it seemed 
to the young poet, was it that he should 
have met Beatrice when she was almost 
beginning her ninth year and he almost 
ending his. Here alone was an evidence 
that they were born for each other. Who 
can forget his hushed account of his 

14 I 




Dante and Beatrice 
first meeting with that "youngest of the 
angels " ? 

" Nine times already since my birth had 
the heaven of light returned to the self- 
same point almost, as concerns its own 
revolution, when first the glorious Lady 
of my mind was made manifest to my eyes, 
even she who was called Beatrice by 
many who knew not wherefore. She had 
already been in this life for so long as 
that, within her time, the starry heaven 
had moved towards the eastern quarter 
on;' of the twelve parts of a degree; so 
that she appeared to me at the beginning 
of her ninth year almost, and I saw her 
almost at the end of my ninth year. Her 
dress, on that day, was of a most noble 
colour, a subdued and goodly crimson, 
girdled and adorned in such sort as best 
suited with her very tender age. At that 
moment, I say most truly that the spirit 
of life, which hath its dwelling in the 
secretest chamber of the heart, began to 
tremble so violently that the least pulses 



<~w. 









w' 



Old Love Stories Retold 
of my body shook therewith; and in trembling 
it said these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui 
veniens dominabitur mihi [Here is a deity stronger 
than I; who, coming, shall rule over me]." 

It is probable that this historic meeting thus 
mystically described had come of Dante's father 
one day taking the boy with him to a festa — or, 
as we should say, a party — given by his neigh- 
bour Folco de Portinari. Dante's father was, it 
would appear, a well-to-do lawyer, with old 
blood in his veins, but still of the burgher class; 
whereas Portinari was probably richer and in a 
higher social position. 

Another nine years was to pass before Dante 
and Beatrice were even to speak to each other 
— for it does not appear that they had spoken 
on that first meeting — and by that time she had 
been given in marriage to a banker of Florence, 
one Simon de Bardi. Meanwhile, Dante may 
have caught glimpses of her in church or on the 
street, but beyond such slight sustenance his 
love had had nothing to feed on all those years. 
Once again Dante dwells on the recurrence of 
the significant number nine in his history. " After 
[16] 






Dilute and Beatrice 
the lapse," says he, "of so many days that nine 
years exactly were completed since the above- 
written appearance of this most gracious being, 
on the last of those days it happened that the 
same wonderful lady appeared to me dressed all 
in pure white, between two gentle ladies elder 
than she. And passing through a street, she 
turned her eyes thither where I stood sorely 
abashed; and by her unspeakable courtesy, which 
is now guerdoned in the Great Cycle, she saluted 
me with so virtuous a bearing that I seemed then 
and there to behold the very limits of blessedness. 
The hour of her most sweet salutation was 
exactly the ninth of that day; and because it was 
the first time that any words from her reached 
mine ears, I came into such sweetness that I 
parted thence as one intoxicated." 

What were the words, one wonders, that sent 
the poet walking on air through the streets of 
Florence, and shut him up in the loneliness of 
his own room to dream of her, and to write mysti- 
cal sonnets for the interpretation of his fellow 
poets, as was the manner of that day? They 
can hardly have been more than a "Good-morn- 
[17] 



' 














* \ 




- 


»'» . 






11 





*.. 




Old Love Stories Retold 
ing, Messer Alighieri. We have missed 
your face in Florence for ever so long." 
But then the voice and the smile that 
went with the ordinary words! It al- 
most seems as though they must have 
conveyed a rarer message to the poet's 
heart. Or did the poet merely misin- 
terpret according to his hopes an act of 
conventional graciousness ? 

It is to be feared that he did. But, 
be that as it may, that " most sweet saluta- 
tion " sufficed so to fan the flame of love 
in the poet's heart that he grew thin and 
pale from very lovesickness, so that his 
friends began to wonder at him and make 
guesses at the lady. Dante, perceiving 
this, and seeing that he must protect 
Beatrice from any breath of gossip, con- 
ceived the plan of making another lady 
the screen for his love. It chanced that, 
one day Dante being in the. same church 
with Beatrice, a lady sat in a direct line 
between Beatrice and himself, and, as 
she looked round at him several times, 




Dante and Beatrice 
and his eves, in reality burning upon 
Beatrice, might well seem to be answering 
hers, the gossips concluded that she it was 
who had brought him to such a pass of 
love. Becoming aware of the mistake, 
Dante saw in it the needed means of 
shielding Beatrice, and he diligently set 
about confirming the gossips in their error 
by writing poems which seemed to point 
to the other lady, but were in reality in- 
spired by Beatrice. At this time, he tells 
us, he made a list in the form of a " sir- 
yente " of the names of the sixty most 
beautiful women in Florence, and he bids 
us take note of a strange thing: " that hay- 
ing written the list, I found my lady's 
name would not stand otherwise than 
ninth in order among the names of these 
ladies ! " 

In course of time, travel took his beau- 
tiful ''screen" from Florence, and it be- 
came necessary for him to find a substi- 
tute. This he was presently enabled to 
do, and soon he became so identified with 




■ 




Old Love Stories Retold 
his fictitious lady, and rumour began to speak such 
evil of them both, that his /n true lady, "the 
destroyer of all evil and the queen of all good," 
meeting him one day, denied him her salutation. 
Thereon, in bitter grief, Dante took counsel of 
Love, and composed a veiled song which should 
reveal the truth to Beatrice and yet hide it. But 
how she received it, or whether or not she took 
him back into her favour, is not made clear. It 
hardly seems as though she had done so from 
the next occasion on which we see them in each 
other's company. This was one of great sorrow 
and bitterness, and is described so vividly oy 
Dante himself that I will transcribe his own 
words : 

" After this battling with many thoughts, it 
chanced on a day that my most gracious lady 
was with a gathering of ladies in a certain place; 
to the which I was conducted by a friend of 
mine. . . . And they were assembled around a 
gentlewoman who was given in marriage that 
day; the custom of the city being that these 
should bear her company when she sat down 
for the first time at table in the house of her hus- 
[20] 



Dafite and Beatrice 
band. Therefore I, as was my friend's pleasure, 
resolved to stay wK him and do honour to those 
ladies. 

" But as soon as I had thus resolved, I began 
to feel a faintness and a throbbing at my left side, 
which soon took possession of my whole body. 
Whereupon I remember that I covertly leaned 
my back unto a painting that ran round the walls 
of that house; and being fearful lest my trembling 
should be discerned of them, I lifted mine eyes 
to look upon those ladies, and then first perceived 
among them the excellent Beatrice. And when 
I perceived her, all my senses were overpowered 
by the great lordship that Love obtained, finding 
himself so near unto that most gracious being, 
until nothing but the spirits of sight remained to 
me. . . . By this, many of her friends, having 
discerned my confusion, began to wonder; and, 
together with herself, kept whispering of me and 
mocking me. Whereupon my friend, who knew 
not what to conceive, took me by the hands, and 
drawing me forth from among them, required to 
know what ailed me. Then, having first held 
me at quiet for a space until my perceptions were 
[21] 



Old Love Stories 
come back to me, I made answer to my 
friend : ' Of a surety I have now set my 
feet on that point of life beyond the 
which he must not pass who would re- 
turn. 

From that moment Dante's passion 
was an open secret among his acquaint- 
ance, and his lovelorn looks were matter 
of jest among them. We read of no 
more meetings with Beatrice, except a 
chance encounter in the street as she 
walked with a beautiful friend named Joan. 
Whether she gave or withheld her saluta- 
tion on this occasion, Dante does not 
tell us Meanwhile, her father had died, 
and Dante had written her a poem of 
sympathy; also he himself had been so 
sick that thoughts of death had come 
close to him, and with them a prophetic 
vision of the death of Beatrice, all too 
soon to be fulfilled. Dante tells how 
he was busied with a long, carefully con- 
ceived poem in celebration of her beauty 
and her virtue, and had composed but 

22 





Dante and Beatrice 
one stanza, "when the Lord God of jus- 
tice called my most gracious lady unto 
Himself, that she might be glorious under 
the banner of that blessed Queen Mary 
whose name had always a deep reverence 
in the words of holy Beatrice." Heaven 
had need of her. Earth was no fit place 
for so fair a spirit. 

A love such as Dante's, dream-born 
and dream-fed, and never at any time 
nourished on the realities of earthly lov- 
ing, would necessarily be intensified by 
the death of the beloved. That mysteri- 
ous consecration which death always 
brings with it especially transfigures the 
memories of the young and the beautiful. 
She had come nearer to him rather than 
gone farther away. So, at least, he could 
feign in his imagination, where he was 
now free to enthrone her forever as the 
bride of his soul — without the thought of 
any Simon de Bardi to break in upon his 
dream. In life she could never be his, but 
in her death they were no longer divided. 









Old Love Stories Retold 
Yet before this dream could grow into an 
assured reality for him, bringing firmness and 
peace to his heart, there were many months of 
bitter human grief to pass through. Beatrice 
was indeed a saint in heaven, but ah! she no 
longer walked the streets of Florence. Like any 
other bereaved lover, he sought many anodynes 
for his grief — some unworthy ones, for which 
his conscience reproached him at the time and 
long years after. With the instinct of the poet, 
he first sought the consolation of beautiful words. 
As some men fly to wine in sorrow, the poet flies 
to verse. "When my eyes," he says, "had wept 
for some while, until they were so weary with 
weeping that I could no longer through them 
give ease to my sorrow, I bethought me that a 
few mournful words might stand me instead of 
tears. And therefore I proposed to make a 
poem, that weeping I might speak therein of her 
for whom so much sorrow had destroyed my 
spirit; and I then began 'The eyes that weep.'" 

"Beatrice is pone up into high Heaven, 

The kingdom where the angels are at peace; 
And lives with them: and to her friends is dead. 

[24] 



Dante and Beatrice 

" Not by the frost of winter was she driven 
Away, like others; nor by summer-heats; 
Hut through a perfect gentleness, instead. 
For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead 
Such an exceeding glory went up hence 
That it woke wonder in the Eternal sire, 
Until a sweet desire 
Entered Him for that lovely excellence, 

So that He bade her to Himself aspire; 
Counting this weary and most evil place 
Unworthy of a thing so full of grace. 

" Wonderfully out of the beautiful form 

Snared her clear spirit, waxing glad the while; 
And is in its first home, there where it is. 
Who speaks thereof, and feels not the tears warm 
Upon his face, must have become so vile 

As to be dead to all sweet sympathies. ..." 

Later, he tells us how he found consolation in 
the sympathy of a certain "young and very- 
beautiful lady," consolation so tender and kind 
th.it he confesses, in self-reproach, that his "eyes 
began to be gladdened overmuch by her com- 
pany, through which thing many times I had 
much unrest, and rebuked myself as a base 
person." 

That he also experimented with the commoner 
anodynes of grief seems certain from this stern 
sonnet addressed to him by his first of friends, 
Guido Cavalcanti : 

[ 25 ] 








Old Love Stories Retold 



I come to thee by daytime constantly, 

But in thy thoughts too much of baseness find: 
Greatly it grieves me for thy gentle mind, 

And for thy many virtues gone from thee. 

It was thy wont to shun much company, 
Unto all sorry concourse ill inclin'd: 
And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind, 

Had made me treasure up thy poetry. 

But now I dare not, for thine abject life, 
Make manifest that I approve thy rimes; 
Nor come I in such sort that thou mayst know. 
Ah! prythee read this sonnet many times: 

So shall that evil one who bred this strife 

Be thrust from thy dishonoured soul and go." 



That Guido Cavalcanti did not write 
thus without cause, is proved by Beatrice's 
solemn reproach of him in the " Purga- 
torio." Indeed, she implies that his way 
of life at this time was the cause of his 
vision of the Inferno : 

"So low he fell, that all appliances 
For his salvation were already short, 
Save showing him the people of perdition." 

In the same poem he admits: 

"The things that present were 
With their false pleasure turned aside my steps, 
Soon as your countenance concealed itself." 



Dante and Beatrice 
But, through all, the dream of his love 
was growing more bright and sure; and 
soon it was to ascend above all earthly 
fumes, and shine down on him, the fixed 
guiding star of a life that, in its turbulent 
vicissitudes and bitter sorrows, was, more 
than most, to need the sustaining light of 
such a spiritual ideal. 

Dante was to marry, and his wife 
(lemma was to bear him seven children — 
a wife who cannot have been unsym- 
pathetic to his dream, for she allowed 
him to name their daughter Beatrice; 
Florence was to become the second pas- 
sion of his life; he was to descend into 
hell, and eat the bitter bread of exile: but 
through all, growing brighter with the 
years, shone down upon his rough and 
devious pathway the white girl-star of 
Beatrice. His first love was his last. 
Commentators have endeavoured to ex- 
plain her away as a metaphysical sym- 
bol, and Dante himself came to think of 
Beatrice as an impersonation of Divine 

27 







Old Love Stories Retold 
Wisdom. In the close of his long and strenuous 
life, it might well seem to him that her having 
lived on earth at all was a dream of his boyhood, 
so far away that dreaming boyhood of the " Vita 
Nuova" must have seemed; but, for all that, 
we know that it was just a young girl's face that 
led this strong stern man of iron and tears safely 
through his pilgrimage of the world. 

"All ye that pass along Love's trodden way 
Pause ye awhile," 

and meditate upon this marvel. 



[28] 



II 



Aucassin and Nicolete* 



THOUGH the song-story — " cante-f able- " 
— " C'est d' Aucassin et de Nicolete," has 
long had an antiquarian interest for scholars, it 
is only during the last twenty years or so that it 
has taken its place in the living literature of the 
world, and given two of the most fragrant names 
to the mythology of lovers. Monsieur Bida in 
France, and Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. F. W. 
Bourdillon in England, are to be thanked for 
rescuing this precious pearl from the dust-heaps 
of philological learning. In England Mr. Bour- 
dillon was first with a very graceful and scholarly 
translation. Walter Pater in his famous essays 
on " The Renaissance " early directed to it the 

* Though Aucassin and Nicolete are not historically 
authenticated lovers, being the children of a troubadour's 
imagination, I have ventured to include their story, 
because they have long since been real to us — through 
romance. 

[29] 



Old Love Stories Retold 
attention of amateurs of such literary 
delicacies; but practically Mr. Lang is 
its sponsor in English, by virtue of a 
translation which for freshness and grace 
and tender beauty may well take the 
place of the original with those of us for 
whom Old French has its difficulties. 
Nine years before, Mr. Edmund Clarence 
Stedman had introduced the lovers to 
American readers in " A Masque of 
Poets." There in a single lyric Mr. Sted- 
man has so skilfully concentrated the 
romance of the old story that I venture 
to quote from it, particularly as Mr. 
Stedman has done readers of his poetry 
the mysterious unkindness of omitting 
it from his collected poems: 



"Within the garden oi' Biaucaire 

He met her by a secret stair, — 
The night was centuries ago. 
Said Aucassin, 'My love, my pet, 
These old confessors vex me so! 
They threaten all the pains oi' hell 
Unless 1 give you up, ma belle,' — 
Said Aucassin to Nieolelle. 



Aucassin and Nicolete 



"Now, wlio should there in heaven l>c 
To fill your place, ma tres-douce mie? 
To roach that spot I little care! 
There all the droning priests arc met; — 
All the old cripples, too, arc there 
That unto shrines and altars cling, 
To filch the Peter-pence we bring'; — 
Said Aucassin to Nicolette. 

'To purgatory I would go 
With pleasant comrades whom we know. 
Pair scholars, minstrels, lusty knights 
Whose deeds the land will not forget, 
The captains of a hundred fights, 
The men of valor and degree: 
We'll join that gallanl company,' — 
Said Aucassin to Nicolette. 

'Sweet players on the cithern strings 
And they who roam the world like kings 
Are gathered there, s.. blithe and free! 
Pardie! I'd join them now. my pet. 
If you went also, ma douce mie! 
The joys of heaven I'd forego 
To have you with me there lielow,' — 
Said Aucassin to Nicolette." 



Hero the three notes of the old song 
story are admirably struck: the force and 
freshness of young passion, the trouba- 
dourish sweetness of literary manner, the 
rebellious humanity. Young love has 
ever been impatient of the middle-aged 




Old Love Stories Re to Id 
wisdom of the world, and fiercely resisted the 
pious or practical restraints to its happiness; 
but perhaps the rebelliousness of young hearts 
has never been so audaciously expressed as in 
"Aucassin and Nicolete." The absurdity of 
parents who, after all these generations of ex- 
perience, still confidently oppose themselves to 
that omnipotent passion which Holy Writ itself 
tells us many waters cannot quench; the absurdity 
of thin-blooded, chilly old maids of both sexes 
who would have us believe that this warm- 
hearted ecstasy is an evil thing, and that prayer 
and fasting are better worth doing — not in the 
most " pagan " literature of our own time have 
these twin absurdities been assailed with more 
outspoken contempt than in this naif old ro- 
mance of the thirteenth century. The Count 
Bougars de Valence is at war with Count Garin 
de Biaucaire. The town of Biaucaire is closely 
besieged and its Count is in despair, for he is an 
old man, and his son Aucassin, who should take 
his place, is so overtaken with a hopeless passion 
that he sits in a lovesick dream, refusing to put 
on his armour or to take any part in the defense 
[32] 



Aueassin and Nicolete 
of the town. His father reproaches him, and 
how absolutely of our own day rings his half- 
bored, half -impatient answer. - ' Father,' said 
Aueassin, ' I marvel that you will be speaking. 
Never may God give me aught of my desire if I 
be made knight, or mount my horse, or face stour 
and battle wherein knights smite and are smitten 
again, unless thou give me Nicolete, my true 
love, that I love so well. . . .' ' 

Father — can't you understand ? How strange 
old people are! Don't you see how it is? 

"Father, I marvel that you will be speaking!" 
It is the eternal exclamation, the universal shrug, 
of youth confronted by "these tedious old fools!" 

Now Nicolete is no proper match for Aueassin, 
a great Count's son — though, naturally, in 
Aucassin's opinion, " if she were Empress of 
Constantinople or of Germany, or Queen of 
France or England, it were little enough for her" 
— because she is "the slave girl" of the Count's 
own Captain-at-arms, who had bought her of 
the Saracens, reared, christened and adopted her 
as his "daughter-in-God." Aetually she is the 
daughter of the King of Carthage, though no 
L 33 ] 





Old Love Stories Retold 
one in Biaucaire, not even herself, knows 
of her high birth. The reader, of course, 
would naturally guess as much, for no 
polite jongleur of the Middle Ages, ad- 
dressing, as he did, an audience of the 
highest rank, would admit into his 
stories any but heroes and heroines with 
the finest connections. 

Father and son by turns have an inter- 
view with the Captain. The Captain 
promises the Count to send Nicolete into 
a far country, and the story goes in 
Biaucaire that she is lost, or made away 
with by the order of the Count. The 
Captain, however, having an affection 
for his adopted daughter, and being a 
rich man, secretes her high up in " a rich 
palace with a garden in face of it." To 
him comes Aucassin asking for news of 
his lady. The Captain, with whose 
dilemma it is possible for any one not 
in his first youth to sympathize, lectures 
Aucassin not unkindly after the pre- 
scribed formulas. It is impossible for 




34 



Aucassin and Nicolete 
Aucassin to marry Nicolete, and wore he 
less honest, hell would be his portion and 
Paradise closed against him forever. It 
is in answer to this admirable common 
sense that Aucassin flashes out his famous 
defiance. "Paradise!" he laughs "in 
Paradise what have I to win ? Therein I 
seek not to enter, but only to have Nico- 
lete, my sweet lady that I love so well. 
For into Paradise go none but such folk 
as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these 
same old priests, and halt old men and 
maimed, who all day and night cower con- 
tinually before the altars and in the crypts; 
and such folk as wear old amices and old 
clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoe- 
less, and covered with sores, perishing of 
hunger and thirst, and of cold, and of 
little ease. These be they that go into 
Paradise, with them have I naught to 
make. Put into hell would I fain go; 
for into hell fare the goodly clerks, and 
goodly knights that fall in tourneys and 
great wars, and stout men-at-arms, and 





i 



^ 






•Uj 



Old Love Stories Retold 
all men noble. With these would I liefly go. 
And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous 
that have two lovers, or three, and their lords 
also thereto. Thither go the gold, and the silver, 
and cloth of vair, and cloth of gris, and harpers, 
and makers, and the princes of this world. With 
these I would gladly go, let me but have with me 
Nicolete, my sweetest lady." 

Aucassin's defiance of priests as well as parents 
is something more significant than the impulsive 
utterance of wilful youth. It is at once, as Pater 
has pointed out, illustrative of that humanistic 
revolt against the ideals of Christian asceticism 
which even in the Middle Ages was already be- 
ginning — a revolt openly acknowledged in the 
so-called Renaissance — and a revolt growingly 
characteristic of our own time. The gospel of 
the Joy of Life is no mere heresy to-day. Rather 
it may be said to be the prevailing faith. Aucas- 
sin's spirited speech is no longer a lonely protest. 
It has become a creed. 

Finding Aucassin unshaken in his determina- 
tion, the Count his father bribes him with a 
promise that, if he will take the field, he shall be 
[36] 




A icolete Weighs How She Mtuj Escape from fht Tower 



Aucassin and Nicolete 
permitted to see Nicolete — "even so long," 
Aucassin stipulates, " that I may have of her two 
words or three, and one kiss." The compact 
made, Aucassin does so mightily " with his hands " 
against the enemy that he raises the siege and 
takes prisoner the Count Bougars de Valence. 
But the father refuses the agreed reward — and 
here, after the charming manner of the old story- 
teller himself, we may leave prose awhile and 
continue the story in verse — the correct formula 
is " Here one singeth " : 

"When the Count Garin doth know 

That his child would ne'er forego 

Love of her that loved him so, 

Nicolete, the bright of brow, 

In a dungeon deep below 

Childe Aucassin did he throw. 

Even there the Childe must dwell 

In a dun-walled marble cell. 

There he waileth in his woe, 

Crying thus as ye shall know: 
'Nicolete, thou lily white. 

My sweet lady, bright of brow, 

Sweeter than the grape art thou. 

Sweeter than sack posset good 

In a cup of maple wood . . . 

'"My sweet lady, lily white, 

Sweet thy footfall, sweet thine eyes, 
And the mirth of thy replies. 

I .'57 1 



Old Love Stories Retold 

" ' Sweet thy laughter, sweet thy face, 
Sweet thy lips and sweet thy brow, 
And the touch of thy embrace. 
Who but doth in thee delight ? 
I for love of thee am bound 
In this dungeon underground, 
All for loving thee must lie 
Here where loud on thee I cry, 
Here for loving thee must die, 
For thee, my love.'" 

Now Nicolete is no less whole-hearted 
and indomitable in her love than Aucas- 
sin. She is like a prophecy of Rosalind 
in her adventurous, full-blooded girl- 
hood. When her master has locked her 
up in the tower, she loses no time in mak- 
ing a vigorous escape by that ladder of 
knotted bedclothes without which ro- 
mance could hardly have gone on exist- 
ing. Who that has read it can forget the 
picture of her as she slips down into the 
moonlit garden, and kilts up her kirtle 
" because of the dew that she saw lying 
deep on the grass " ? — 

" Her locks were yellow and curled, 
her eyes blue and smiling, her face featly 
fashioned, the nose high and fairly set, 




Aucassin and Nicolete 

the lips more red than cherry or rose in 
time <>f summer, her teeth white and 
small; her breasts so firm that they bore 
up the folds of her bodice as they had 
been two apples; so slim she was in the 
waist that your two hands might have 
clipped her, and the daisy flowers that 
brake beneath her as she went tiptoe, and 
that bent above her instep, seemed black 
against her feet, so white was the maiden." 
As Nicolete steals in the moonlight to 
the ruinous tower where her lover lies, she 
hears him " wailing within, and making 
dole and lament for the sweet lady he 
loves so well." The lovers snatch a peril- 
ous talk, while the town's guards pass 
down the street with drawn swords seek- 
ing Nicolete, but not remarking her 
crouched in the shadow of the tower. 
How Nicolete makes good her escape into 
the wildwood and builds a bower of 
woven boughs with her own hands, and 
how Aucassin finds her there, and the joy 
they have, and their wandering together in 



Old Love Stories Retold 

strange lands, their losing eaeh other once more, 
and their final happy finding of each other again 
— " by God's will who loveth lovers " — is not 
all this written in the Book of Love ? - — 



"Sweet the song, the story sweet. 
There is no man hearkens it, 
No man living 'neath the sun 
So outwearied, so foredone, 
Sick and woful, worn and sad, 
But is healed, but is glad, 
'Tis so sweet." 






The story is simple enough, of a pattern old 
and familiar as love itself, but the telling of it is 
a rare achievement of artistry, that artistry which 
is so accomplished as to be able to imitate sim- 
plicity; for, roughly connected as are certain 
parts of the story, " Aucassin and Nicolete " in 
the main is evidently the work of one who was a 
true poet and an exquisite literary craftsman. 
The curious, almost unique, form of it is one of 
its most characteristic charms; for it is written 
alternately in prose and verse. The verse some- 
times repeats in a condensed form what has 
already been related in the prose, sometimes 
elaborates upon it, and sometimes carries on the 
[40] 




Aucassin Finds Nicolete in a Bower in the Wood. 



Aucassin and Nicolete 

story independently. The formula with which 
the prose is introduced is: "So say they, speak 
they, tell they the Tale," and the formula for 
introducing the verse, as already noted, is: 
"Here one singeth." These formulas, and the 
fact that the music for some of the songs has come 
down to us on the precious unique manuscript 
preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale, lead 
critics to think that the romance was probably 
presented by a company of jongleurs, with music, 
and possibly with some dramatic action. The 
author is unknown, and the only reference to 
him is his own in the opening song: 

"Who would list to the good lay. 
Gladness of the captive gray ?" 

M. Gaston Paris suggests that the " viel caitif" 

lived and wrote in the time of Louis VII. (1130), 

and Mr. Lang draws a pretty picture of the 

"elderly, nameless minstrel strolling with his 

viol and his singing-boys . . . from castle to 

castle in 'the happy poplar land.'" Beaucaire 

is better known nowadays for its ancient fair 

than for its lovers. According to tradition, that 

fair has been held annually for something like a 

[41] 




1 





Old Love Stories Retold 
thousand years — and our lovers have 
been dead almost as long. Still, thanks 
to the young heart of that unknown old 
troubadour, their love is as fresh as a 
may-bush in his songs, the dew is still 
on the moonlit daisies where Nicolete's 
white feet have just passed, and her 
bower in the wildwood is as green as the 
day she wove it out of boughs and 
flowers. As another old poet has sung, 
"the world might find the spring by 
following her " — so exquisitely vernal 
is the spirit that breathes from this old 
song story. To read in it is to take the 
advice given to Aucassin by a certain 
knight. "Aucassin," said the knight, 
"of that sickness of thine have I been 
sick, and good counsel will I give thee 
. . . mount thy horse, and go take thy 
pastime in yonder forest, there wilt thou 
see the good flowers and grass, and hear 
the sweet birds sing. Perchance thou 
shalt hear some word, whereby thou shalt 
be the better." 




42 



Aucassin and Nicole tc 
The reader will do well to take the 
knight's advice, and follow into the wood- 
land "the fair white feet of Nieolete." 




43 



III 

Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope 
Devereux 

r 

IT is strange that a love story connected with 
so illustrious a name as that of Sir Philip 
Sidney should, practically, be forgotten. Sidney 
lives in the popular imagination by the famous 
anecdote of the cup of cold water, and as the 
type of all that was gallant and gentle in the 
Elizabethan gentleman. But it is doubtful 
whether, in spite of Charles Lamb's attempt to 
refresh the memory of time, any one, outside 
scholars and enthusiasts for the old-fashioned 
gardens of English poetry, ever reads either his 
once famous romance of " Arcadia " or his much 
more important poems. Sonnet anthologies 
usually contain the sonnet, " With how sad steps, 
O Moon, thou climb'st the sky," but the sequence 
of which it is but one constituent, that fascinat- 
ing, heartfelt sequence of sonnets and songs which 
tells of the loves of " Astrophel and Stella," is, 
[44] 



Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux 

I imagine, very seldom taken from its dusty shelf. 
Yet, what an ever-fragrant garden it is, and how 
vividly its old passionate story still tells itself in 
the old, ever young, words. 

Doubtless it suffers with the general reader 
from its old spelling and its euphuistie coneeits, 
and its general air of archaism. Nothing 
frightens your general reader like long " s's " 
and unnecessary "e's." It may be said that 
when a poet is great enough, he is sure to be 
printed without these marks of the antiquity 
from which he comes. Shakespeare's sonnets, 
for example, are in their original spelling no less 
ruffed and doubleted than Sidney's, but we know 
them in the spelling of our own time. Chaucer, 
however, is a great poet whom we have to take 
as he himself spelled or not at all. And so with 
Sidney — though, of course, his archaism is 
nothing like so difficult. Actually, of course, to 
the true lover of old poetry there is a positive 
charm in the quaint look of the old spelling, and 
a real gain in atmosphere. There is, too, some- 
thing naive and appealing about it, similar to 
the charm that sometimes belongs to the accent 
[ « ] 



Old Love Stories Retold 
of a foreigner talking English. It is the 
fascinating broken accent of antiquity. 
Take this sonnet with which the love- 
journal of "Astrophel and Stella" opens: 

"Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to 
show, 
That she, deare She, might take some pleasure 
of my paine, — 
Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might 
make her know, 
Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace 
obtaine, — 
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of 
woe; 
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine, 
Oft turning other's leaves, to see if thence would 
flow 
Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne- 
burn'd braine. 
But words came halting forth, wanting Inven- 
tion's stay; 
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame 
Studie's blowes; 
And others' feete still seem'd but strangers in my 
way. 
Thus, great with childe to speak, and helplesse 
in my throwes, 
Biting my trewand pen, beating myselfe for spite; 
Foole, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart, 
and write." 

Thus Sidney looked into his heart and 
wrote, so since rely and simply that we, 



■^ 



Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux 
all these years after, can, if we care, look- 
ing into his hook, look into his heart also. 
Many of the sonnets are affected after the 
manner of the time, stuck full of "vain 
amatorious" fancies, as Milton said, hut 
no more so than Shakespeare's own, and 
very soon, underneath all the literary laees 
and fripperies, we are aware of a brave 
heart beating, and almost breaking, with 
a love " that never found its earthly close." 
Certain editors and biographers have 
protested against the natural interpretation 
of Sidney's sonnets, as interested editors 
and biographers will, but the editor of 
Sidney whose opinion matters most, Mr. 
A. W. Pollard, is in favor of the natural 
reading. Most editors seem to consider 
it a point of honour to whitewash their 
heroes out of all their common humanity 
and to reduee them as much as possible 
to models of abstract power and perfec- 
tion. In Sidney's case, some of us may 
find a character of such legendary ex- 
cellence gain rather than lose by a story 

47 :' 




^H 



II 



Old Love Stories Retold 
which reveals him possessed too of like human 
passion and frailty with ourselves. Sidney's 
grace and gentleness, as often happens with 
people of gentle manners and delicate natures, 
have somewhat unfairly sweetened and sanctified 
his memory, so that the world has forgotten that 
he was a brave soldier as well as a graceful 
courtier; a man of stern moral courage — as 
witness his outspoken criticism of Queen Eliza- 
beth's proposed Spanish match; an impulsive 
and intrepid antagonist — as witness his un- 
accepted challenge to the brutal and bullying 
Earl of Oxford; and a fiery and fearless lover 
whose passion was far from expending itself in 
sonnets. 

It appears probable that Astrophel first set 
eyes upon his Stella in the summer of 1575, at 
Chartley Castle, the seat of the Earl of Essex, on 
the occasion of Queen Elizabeth's visit there. 
Sidney, though as yet not twenty-one, was already 
a gallant and accomplished figure at court, and 
persona grata with the Queen, in whose train he 
arrived at Chartley, fresh from Kenilworth and 
those historic festivities of his magnificent uncle, 
[48] 



Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux 
the Earl of Leicester. The little Lady Penelope 
Devereux, eldest daughter of his host and hostess, 
was only twelve, but already of a strange and 
striking beauty. Being, too, as her subsequent 
career proved, of a romantic temperament, she 
could hardly fail to have been interested in the 
brilliant young courtier, though indeed, so far 
as we can judge, neither Sidney nor she appears 
to have fallen in love at first sight. Sidney 
definitely speaks for himself on this point in his 
second sonnet: 

" Not at the first sight, nor with a d ribbed shot, 

Love gave the wound, which, while I breathe, 

will bleed; 
But knowne worth did in mine of time proceed, 
Till by degrees it hail full conquest got. 
I saw, and liked; I liked, but loved not; 

I loved, but straight did not what Love decreed: 
At length, to Love's decrees I, fore'd, agreed, 
Yet with repining at so partiall lot." 

And there seems good reason to think that 
Penelope's love was of even still slower growth. 
Nevertheless, Sidney appears to have lost no 
time in following up the acquaintance thus be- 
gun at ('hartley, and very soon we find him a 
frequent visitor at Durham House and high in 
[49] 



^WRBMBWl 



Old Love Stories Retold 
the affections of Penelope's father, who, 
it is said, was wont to call him his " son 
by adoption " and who, on his death-bed, 
in the September of 1576 — when Sidney 
was hastening toward him, to arrive, 
alas ! too late — left him this touching 
message: "Oh, that good gentleman, 
have me commended unto him. And 
tell him I sent him nothing, but I wish 
him well — so well, that if God do move 
their hearts, I wish that he might match 
with my daughter. I call him son — he 
is so wise, virtuous, and godly. If he 
go on in the course he hath begun, he 
will be as famous and worthy a gentle- 
man as ever England bred." 

It appears soon to have been common 
talk at court that the dying Earl's wish 
was to take, or had already taken, the 
form of a definite engagement. So 
matters stood in the autumn of 1576, 
when the darkness of time suddenly falls 
upon the story, and the historian is left 
to conjecture; till once more, in 1581, 




Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux 

the startling fact emerges that Penelope 
has been married, not to Sidney, but to 
Lord Rich, a man of very different type, 
coarse and cruel, and, it would appear, 
by no means Penelope's own choice. 
There exists a letter from the Earl of 
Devonshire to James I. in which the 
Earl states that, Penelope " being in the 
power of her friends, she was by them 
married against her will unto one against 
whom she did protest at the very solemnity 
and ever after." The reason of this en- 
forced marriage is very plausibly sug- 
gested by Mr. Pollard, who has pieced 
together the whole story with skill. Two 
years after her husband's death, the 
Dowager Countess of Essex (that is, 
Penelope's mother) was married to 
Philip's uncle, the Earl of Leicester. Up 
to that time Philip had been his uncle's 
heir, and, therefore, one of the best 
matches in England, but with that mar- 
riage and the subsequent arrival of a 
cousin, Philip, as Mr. Pollard points out, 

5] 




Old Love Stories Retold 
became a poor, even a very poor, gentleman. 
Penelope's mother and friends might, therefore, 
be anxious to find her a wealthier husband. So 
Mr. Pollard, with great probability, accounts 
for Lord Rich's place in the story. Surely, if 
this conjecture be correct, it must have seemed 
the bitterest of ironies for the two lovers that the 
marriage of Stella's mother to her lover's uncle 
should thus destroy the happiness of their lives. 
Whether or not Philip and Penelope had been 
formally engaged during this interval, it is cer- 
tain that he and she saw much of each other at 
the houses of mutual relatives and friends, and 
that they were still seeing each other in the sum- 
mer and the late autumn of 1580. Though the 
love up till then seems to have been mainly, if not 
entirely, on Sidney's side, and Penelope's atti- 
tude rather that of a coquette, attracted but still 
unwon, there seems no reason for thinking that 
Lord Rich was as yet a factor in her future; and, 
indeed, her forced marriage with him may have 
come to her with no less shock of cruel surprise 
than it appears to have come with to Sidney him- 
self. Judging by one of Sidney's songs, his first 
[52] 




Portrait of Sidney in Armor 
From Original Engraving 



Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux 
anger seems to have been directed against Penel- 
ope herself, and one may add that a man of 
Sidney's calibre would hardly inveigh against a 
woman in the fashion of this stanza without her 
having given him the excuse of at least great 
hopes of her love: 

"Ring out your belles, let mourning shewes be spread; 
For Love is dead: 

All Love is dead, infected 
With plague of deep disdaine: 

Worth, as nought worth, rejected, 
And Faith faire scorne doth gaine. 

From so ungratefull fancie, 

From such a femall franzie, 

From them that use men thus, 

Good Lord, deliver us!" 

Before writing the last stanza of the poem, 
however, which reads like a postscript, Sidney 
appears to have realized the truth: that Stella 
was not unfaithful to him, but that she, rather 
than he, was the victim : 

"Alas, I lie: rage hath this crrour bred; 
Love is not dead ; 

Love is not dead, but sleepeth 
In her unmatched mind, 

Where she his counsel I keepeth, 
Till due desert she find. 

[53] 



Old Love Stories Retold 

" Therefore from so vile fancie, 
To call such wit a franzie, 
Who Love can temper thus, 
Good Lord, deliver us!" 

And, with the realization that she was 
in no true sense the wife of Lord Rich, 
he seems to have determined that such 
a so-called marriage should be no bar 
to his true love, but that Penelope 
Devereux virtually, and even virtuously, 
remained Penelope Devereux still; a 
woman still honourably to be wooed and 
rightfully to be won. So, at least, it 
seems natural to interpret this stanza 
which concludes a poem entitled "The 
Smokes of Melancholy": 

" For me, alas, I am full resolv'd 
Those bands, alas, shall not he dissolv'd; 
Nor breake my word, though reward come late; 
Nor faile my faith in my failing fate; 
Nor change in change, though change change 

my state: 
But alwayes one myselfe with eagle eyde Trueth, 

to flie 
Up to the sunne, although the sunne my wings 

do frie; 
For if those flames burne my desire, 
Yet shall I die in Phoenix' fire." 

54 




Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux 

That Sidney followed up this resolve 
with a determination which had perhaps 
never before marked his wooing is proved 
by something like two-thirds of the entire 
" Astrophel and Stella." In these sonnets 
and songs the story of his heart can be 
read, as it were, from day to day. And if 
we can judge by two outspoken sonnets 
punning on the hated name of Rich, he 
appears to have made no secret of his 
hatred for the man who had bought the 
woman he loved against her will. Here 
is one of them : 

"Toward Aurora's Court a nymph doth dwell, 

Rich in all beauties which man's eye can see; 

Beauties so farre from reach of words, that we 
Abase her praise saying she doth excell; 
Rich in the treasure of deserv'd renowne, 

Rich in the riches of a royall hart, 
Rich in those gifts which give th' eternall crowne; 

Who, though most rich in these and everie part 
Which make the patents of true worldly blisse, 
Hath no misfortune but that Rich she is." 

If no true blame attaches to Sidney 
for his refusal to recognize such a mar- 
riage, surely it was not wrong in Penelope 







Old Love Stories Retold 
(who, it must be remembered, was so lately a 
woman — she was only eighteen on her marriage) 
to realize for the first time by the eruel contrast 
of her marriage what she had lost by her possible 
previous coquetry with Sidney, and to give to 
his wooing a value and a hearing such as, in her 
unawakened, irresponsible girlhood, she had 
never thought or cared to give it before. A girl 
married, as she was married, brutally against 
her will, could hardly be blamed for even more 
serious forms of rebellion than giving ear to a 
noble lover whom too late she had learned to 
love. We can, therefore, do no injustice to 
Penelope in deducing from Sidney's sonnets that 
it was not till after she became Lady Rich that 
her love for Sidney really awoke. We may do 
this with the less fear of injustice for two good 
reasons. Sidney was not the man to pursue 
Stella with a love which she had manifestly and 
definitely shown him she did not desire; nor, 
therefore, was he the man to write falsely about 
the incidents of his wooing, even in the licensed 
form of the sonnet. Again, everything he tells 
us is eminently in Stella's favour. He reveals 
[56] 



Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux 
indeed that, after patient importunity, he had 
persuaded her to acknowledge her love, but he 
reveals too with what reluetanee the confession 
had been drawn from her, how innocent were 
the tokens she had given of her love, and how 
she had striven with his more lawless passion — 
striven, as the lofty feeling and resolution of the 
concluding sonnets prove, with a gentle firmness 
far from in vain. 

To illustrate the story by adequate quotations 
would take up too much space, and indeed many 
of the sonnets most significant historically are 
of least worth poetically, and may well be left 
for the reader to peruse for himself. Here, how- 
ever, is one that can hardly be omitted, as it 
proves at once Stella's love for Sidney and the 
fine nature of that love: 

"Late tyr'd with wo, even ready for to pine 

With rage of love, I cald ray Love unkind; 
She in whose eyes love, though unfelt, doth shine, 

Sweet said, that I true love in her should find. 
I joyed; hut straight thus watred was my wine: 

That love she did, hut loved a love not blind, 
Which would not let me, whom she loved, decline 

From nobler course, fit for ray birth and mind: 
And therefore, by her love's authority, 

[57] 



Old Love Stories Retold 




" Wild me these tempests of vaine love to flie. 
And anchor fast my selfe on Vertue's shore. 
Alas, if this the only mettall be 
Of love new-coind to helpe my beggery, 

Deare, love me not, that ye may love me more." 

This is followed by a playful sonnet 
which, as with many of the poems that 
tell us this sad old story, is all the more 
appealingly human for its very playful- 
ness. Stella had said "No, no!" to some 
loving advance of Sidney's. Accepting 
her rebuff, Sidney reminds her of the 
old grammatical rule that two negatives 
make an affirmative: 

"... For late, with heart most high, with eyes 
most low, 
I erav'd the thing which ever she denies; 
She, lightning love, displaying Venus' skies, 
Least once should not be heard, twise said, No, 
No! 
Sing then, my Muse, now Io Pa?an sing; 
Heav'ns envy not at my high triumphing, 
But grammer's force with sweet successe con- 
firme: 
For grammer sayes, — O this, deare Stella, 

say, — 
For grammer sayes, — to grammer who sayes 
nay ? — 
That in one speech two negatives affirme!" 



Sir Philip Sid?iey & Lady Devereux 

The reference is perhaps to an occasion 

still more poignantly celebrated in one of 

the songs, which the reader may care to 

find for himself — with the refrain : 

"Take me to thee, and thee to me: 
'No, no, no, no, my Deare, let be. 

It is evident that when Sidney deter- 
mined to be Penelope's lover in earnest, 
he was impatient with half-measures, and 
it may well have seemed to his soldierly 
sense of action that such a husband as 
Lord Rich was a man to fight, and if 
necessary kill, for the release of such a 
wife. But Penelope, though later in life 
she was to take short cuts to a happiness 
perhaps less worthy than Sidney offered 
her, would give no ear to his desperate 
proposals. Once, we read, she was angry 
with him for some time because, having 
come upon her while she dozed, he had 
stolen a kiss. She seems to have for- 
given him the theft, and afterwards, on 
rare occasions, to have saved him from 
being again a thief by a timely gift. But 




Old Love Stories Retold 
the ardours and hopes which even such a guarded 
graeiousness aroused in Sidney appear to have 
grown too perilous for her conscience, and in one 
of the sweetest reproofs in poetry — a reproof 
whose very tenderness means the very gift that is 
denied — she begs Sidney to desist : for her and 
honour's sake. I quote only a few verses, the 
artificial pastoral style of which must not dis- 
guise for the reader the vital significance beneath : 

"In a grove most rich of shade, 
Where birds wanton musicke made, 
May, then yong, his pide weedes showing, 
New-perfumed with flowers fresh growing: 

"Astrophel with Stella sweete 
Did for mutual comfort meete, 
Both within themselves oppressed, 
But each in the other blessed. 

"Him great harmes had taught much care, 
Her faire necke a foule yoke bare; 
But her sight his cares did banish, 
In his sight her yoke did vanish." 

Astrophel growing too eager in his love, Stella 
thus admonishes him: 

"Astrophel, sayd she, my love, 
Cease, in these effects, to prove; 
Now be still, yet still beleeve me, 
Thy griefe more than death would grieve me. 

[60] 






Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux 

"If that any thought in me 
Can tast comfort but of thee, 
Let me, fed with hellish anguish, 
Joylesse, hopelesse, endlesse languish . . . 

"If to secret of my hart, 
I do any wish impart, 
Where thou art not foremost placed, 
Be both wish and I defaced. 

"If more may be sayd, I say, 
All my blisse in thee I lay; 
If thou love, my love content thee. 
For all love, all faith is meant thee. 

"Trust me, while I thee deny, 
In my selfe the smart I try; 
Tyran honour doth thus use thee, 
Stella's selfe might not refuse thee 

"Therefore, deere, this no more move, 
Least, though I leave not thy love, 
Which too deep in me is framed, 
I should blush when thou are named." 

Did a loving woman ever deny her lover in 
words of more heavenly tenderness and purity, 
and did ever a lover interpret such a denial with 
so fine a touch ? The whole poem seems to have 
a prophetic accent of Lovelace's famous cry a 
hundred years later: 

"I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not honour more." 

[61] 







Old Love Stories Retold 
But, mirror of chivalry and soul of 
honour as Sidney was, it seems to have 
taken him some time to accept the lesson 
Stella thus taught; and, indeed, it might 
well seem that the true honour was on the 
side of his honourable love rather than on 
the side of a dishonourable marriage. 
Indeed, when at last we find him bidding 
his noble farewell to the love that was 
the very life of his pure heart, the terms 
of his farewell do not indicate that he 
abandoned that love from any sense of 
its dishonour in that worldly sense of 
which Stella had reminded him, but be- 
cause — as some saint might abandon 
the world for the service of God, or as 
some patriot might sacrifice his domestic 
ties to the service of his country — he 
had determined to abandon earthly love 
altogether. Stella could not, would not, 
be his, and as time proved her deter- 
mination to be irrevocable, Sidney, in 
spite of all his ardent worship for her, 
could but at length come home to his 



I 



J 




Sir Philip Sidney £sf Lady Devereux 
own soul, and realize that for one of his 
soaring spirit and ambitious mind there 
was other employment than the soul- 
sickness of a disappointed lover. It was, 
we may imagine, with some such realiza- 
tion of his duties to himself, rather than 
in any recognition of unworthiness in a 
love that can never have seemed other than 
sacred to him, that he wrote this sonnet, in 
which the love story of Astrophel and 
Stella is, as it were, carried up to heaven 
with strains of angelic music: 

"Leave me, O Love, which readiest hut to dust; 

And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things; 
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust; 

What ever fades, hut fading pleasure hrings. 
Draw in thy heames, and humble all thy might 

To that sweet yoke where lasting freedomes be; 
Which breakes the clowdes, and opens forth the 

^ light, 

That doth l>oth shine, and give us sight to see. 
() take fast hold; let that light be thy guide 

In this small course which birth drawes out to 
death. 
And think how evill beconiineth him to slide, 

Who seeketh heav'n, and comes of heav'nly 
breath. 
Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see: 
Eternall Love, maintaine thy life in me." 










" i ',■■ .'■] 

''■■■; 






$>' jMUm 






1 lb I 1 








v^_ 







Old Love Stories Retold 
That Sidney, indeed, found himself, and that 
he devoted the few remaining years of his life 
to the "great cause which needs both use and 
art," to which he refers in the last sonnet but one, 
and which, if at the moment of his writing it had 
a more particular meaning, is for us to-day suffi- 
ciently particularized as the service of his country, 
is well enough known from the familiar histories. 
It was probably in the autumn of 1581 that 
Astrophel took that solemn farewell of his Stella. 
That he was married in the March of 1583 to 
Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, 
does not seem to be a fact of any special signifi- 
cance to our story. Disappointed lovers usually 
marry, and Sidney was now once more a dis- 
tinguished man of this world, who might neces- 
sarily wish to marry for many reasons — none of 
which need be counted forgetfulness of Stella. 
On the 17th of October, 1586, he died, as all 
the school-children know, from a wound inflicted 
at the battle of Zutphen on September 22d — and 
even in his own day, so romantic seemed the 
death of such a man, that, although he was, in a 
sense, only a private gentleman of no great official 
[64] 



Sir Philip Sidney cir Lady Devereux 
importance, he was buried like a king in old St. 
Paul's. The court wore mourning for him, and 
it is pleasant to read that Stella's grief was naked 
and unashamed. 

Poor Stella! Her after-life reads like a curi- 
ous paradox. In spite of her husband's brutality, 
she remained his faithful wife for some nine 
years after Sidney's death. But about this time 
she formed an attachment for Sir Christopher 
Blount, and the virtue which had resisted Sidney 
succumbed to him. She fled with her lover and 
lived publicly with him for many years, finally 
being divorced from Lord Rich and sharing with 
Blount his subsequent honors as Earl of Devon- 
shire and his ultimate disgrace. One may be 
pardoned for wishing for Sidney's sake that her 
virtue had withstood to the end. Yet, no doubt, 
the simple answer is that she loved Blount better 
than she loved Sidney- If, like Astrophel, you 
love a star, you must be content to see it shine. 
It is very seldom that the star will love you in 
return. 



[65] 





IV 

Shelley and Mary Godwin 

r 

THE piteous end of Shelley's first 
wife, Harriet Westbrook, has nat- 
urally deflected the sympathy of the 
world in her direction; and it is, of course, 
well that we should give ear to the plea 
on her behalf so beautifully made by 
Mr. William Watson: 

"A star looked down from heaven and loved a 
flower 
Grown in earth's garden — loved it for an hour; 
O you that watch his orbit in the spheres, 
Refuse not to a ruined rosebud tears." 

Yet there was really no danger of the 

world refusing its tears to that ruined 

rosebud. The danger has rather been 

that in giving its sympathy to Harriet it 

has somewhat forgotten that Shelley and 

Mary had a claim on its sympathy too, 

and really a more serious claim. Stars 

have their rights as well as rosebuds, 




66 



Shelley and Mary Godwin 
and if Shelley's marriage with Harriet 
was a tragic mistake for Harriet, it was 
surely no less tragic a mistake for Shelley. 
To find oneself married to the wrong 
woman at the early age of nineteen is a 
terrible enough mistake to begin one's 
life with for any man. For a nature such 
as Shelley's it was a spiritual tragedy of 
the most serious kind. 

When, at last, it was clearly seen that 
the mistake was past mending — and 
seen the more clearly by Shelley, because 
in meeting Mary Godwin he felt, and 
felt rightly, that he had met his true mate 
— Shelley saw but one way out, and 
surely there was no other way. Life with 
Harriet had become impossible for both 
of them. That they had made a school- 
boy and schoolgirl mistake seemed no 
reason for their perpetuating and aggra- 
vating it. Love could alone justify their 
continuing together, and their illusive 
love was dead. 

Was a false marriage to stand in the 



lb* 












>1 




Old Love Stories Retold 
way of a true marriage ? Shelley and Mary de- 
cided that it should not, and though the world 
of their day was against them, time has been on 
their side. Their love story has come to have a 
value for humanity at large. It belongs to the 
important world-series of First Examples. Many 
lovers, indeed, before Shelley and Mary, had 
taken the law into their own hands, but the dif- 
ference between their stories and this story is 
that they have rather represented lawlessness, 
whereas Shelley and Mary break an old law only 
to make a new and better law, or, at least, merely 
to illustrate its necessity. Shelley and Mary 
stand, not so much for rebellious passion, as for 
common sense in the regulation of the difficult 
partnership of the sexes. They represent the 
right of human beings to correct their matrimonial 
mistakes, a right even yet stupidly and super- 
stitiously denied. Their example was not, as 
often misrepresented, in favour of any facile 
promiscuity. Quite the reverse, its significance 
was that of a marriage conceived on the principles 
of the only real monogamy, an instinctive monog- 
amy, based on natural selection, spiritual, mental, 
[68] 







Percy Bysshe Shelley 



Shelley and Mary Godwin 
and physical — a spontaneous, even an eager, 
monogamy, and not merely an arbitrary legal 
fiat. Of all people, Shelley and Mary held the 
doctrine of One Man for One Woman — only, 
they insisted, it must be the Right Man for the 
Right Woman. 

Shelley first became acquainted with Harriet 
through his sister Mary, who was her schoolmate 
at Mrs. Fenning's genteel academy for young 
ladies, at Church House, Clapham. In January, 
1811, Shelley had called at the schoolhouse with 
a letter of introduction to Harriet, and also a 
present to her from Mary. Harriet was then 
about fifteen and a half, Shelley about eighteen 
and a half. Harriet was sixteen on August first, 
and Shelley nineteen on August fourth. Harriet 
appears to have been a pretty, attractive girl, of 
what one might call the May queen type. Good- 
natured, bright in her manner, and accomplished 
after polite boarding-school standards, she was 
the typical, pretty, popular queen of the school. 
Her nature, while essentially commonplace, was 
sympathetically open to the influence of more 
definite natures, and capable, chameleon-like, 
[69] 





Old Love Stories Retold 
of taking its colour from her intimates 
— a pleasing but dangerous gift. She 
was the daughter of one John Westbrook, 
a retired " coffee-house " keeper — other- 
wise publican — a man so Jewish in 
appearance as to be nicknamed "Jew 
Westbrook." Her mother counted for 
nothing, and her home was ruled jointly 
by her father and a forbidding sister, 
Eliza Westbrook, a narrow-minded, 
strong-willed and common-natured wom- 
an, at least twice her age. It was, 
of course, well known at Mrs. Fenning's 
school that the fantastic young poet, 
who occasionally called there to see his 
sisters, was heir to a baronetcy and six 
thousand pounds a year. Shelley, very 
susceptible — and pathetically young — 
was quickly attracted by Harriet's en- 
gaging, popular ways and her pretty 
simulation of a mind; and it was only 
human nature that Eliza Westbrook 
should dream of, and even plan for, this 
possible aristocratic alliance for her sister. 



She /ley mid Mary Godwin 
Shelley had lost no time in filling poor 
Harriet's head with his very youthful 
rationalism on every subject, from the- 
ology to vegetarianism. At first, Harriet 
had been horrified to hear him call him- 
self an "atheist" — one of his favourite 
misrepresentations of himself. If ever 
there was a mind less accurately answer- 
ing: to all that the word " atheist " carries 
with it, it was Shelley's — but Harriet 
became accustomed to the terrible word 
before long, and in a few weeks began 
really to think that she thought the same 
as Shelley. She had, at all events, super- 
ficially assimilated his views sufficiently 
to suffer some persecution for them at 
school, and, it was said, in her own home. 
This " persecution " was all that was 
needed to make Shelley conceive himself 
her champion and protector, and it was a 
boyish chivalry, as noble as it was unwise, 
rather than the impulse of love, that 
prompted Shelley to take the false step of 
marrying Harriet. 




i 








Old Love Stories Retold 
Long before Shelley had met Mary, life with 
Harriet had beeome impossible for him, and even 
if Mary had not entered into the story, it is highly 
improbable that Shelley and Harriet could have 
continued to live together. It must be added, 
too, that before he finally parted from her, Shelley 
firmly believed, rightly or wrongly, that Harriet 
had been unfaithful to him; also that he was 
scrupulously careful to make proper provision 
for her after their separation; that he believed, 
too, that she desired the separation no less than 
himself; and finally, that Harriet's suicide was 
not the direct result of Shelley's leaving her, but 
the result of her desertion by a subsequent lover. 
Shelley had been married to Harriet on August 
28, 1811 — " the united ages of bride and bride- 
groom," as has been said, " making thirty-five." 
It was in May or June of 1814 that he first saw 
Mary, when already the distress and disappoint- 
ment of his marriage were weighing heavily on 
his heart and mind. The daughter of Mary 
Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, brought 
up in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, and, 
indeed, so to say, heiress to a revolutionary tra- 
f72l 



She I ley and Mary Godwin 
dition, was naturally predisposed toward the sad 
young rebel, who not only looked up to her father 
as his master, hut was giving such unselfish proof 
of his reverence by that generous financial assist- 
ance which Godwin was never ashamed to seek 
— even when, with preposterous moral loftiness, 
he was ostentatiously disapproving of Shelley's 
love for his daughter. It was during one of 
Shelley's calls on Godwin, for the purpose of thus 
assisting him, that he saw Mary for the first time. 
She was in her seventeenth year, and is thus de- 
scribed by Professor Dowden : " Shapely, golden 
head, a face very pale and pure, great forehead, 
earnest hazel eyes, and an expression at once of 
sensibility and firmness about her delicately 
curved lips." Her nature was more conserva- 
tive than that of either her father or her mother, 
which made her all the more suitable as a wife 
for Shelley, with his inflammable idealism and 
headlong experimentalism. She seems, too, to 
have combined a firm mental balance with powers 
of strong feeling which were deep, but not de- 
monstrative, and Hogg, a shrewd observer, was 
struck by the impressive quietness of her manner. 
[73] 








Old Love Stories Retold 
Here is an extract from his account of a 
call which he and Shelley made at God- 
win's house, in Skinner Street, on June 8, 
1814. Godwin was out, and while they 
awaited his return, Shelley impatiently 
paced up and down the room. " He 
appeared to he displeased," writes Hogg, 
in his ironical manner, " at not finding 
the fountain of Political Justice. ' Where 
is Godwin ? ' he asked me several times, 
as if I knew. I did not know, and, to 
say the truth, I did not care. He con- 
tinued his uneasy promenade; and I 
stood reading the names of old English 
authors on the hacks of the venerable 
volumes, when the door was partially 
and softly opened. A thrilling voice 
called: 'Shelley!' A thrilling voice an- 
swered : ' Mary ! ' And he darted out of 
the room, like an arrow from the bow of 
the far-shooting king. A very young 
female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, 
and with a piercing look, wearing a frock 
of tartan, an unusual dress in London at 




74 



3 



Shelley and Mary Godwin 
thai time, had called him out of the room. 
He was absent a very short time — a 
minute or two; and then returned. ' God- 
win is out; there is no use in waiting.' 
So we continued our walk along Holborn. 
' Who was that, pray ? ' I asked; ' a daugh- 
ter?' 'Yes.' 'A daughter of William 
Godwin ? ' ' The daughter of Godwin 
and Mary.' This was the first time . . . 
that I beheld a very distinguished lady, of 
whom I have much to say hereafter. It 
was lmt the glance of a moment, through 
a door partly opened. Her quietness cer- 
tainly struck me, and possibly also, for I 
am not quite sure on that point, her pale, 
piercing look." 

Before the end of June, Shelley was 
writing verses to her like these: 

" Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed; 
Yes, I was firm — thus wcrt not thou; 
My harried looks did fear yet dread 

To meet thy looks — I could not know 
How anxiously they sought to shine 
With soothing pity upon mine. 

" To sit and curl> the soul's mute ra^ r e 
Which preys upon itself alone; 



m 



7.3 




Old Love Stories Retold 

" To curse the life which is the cage 

Of fettered grief that dares not groan, 
Hiding from many a careless eye 
The scorned load of agony. 

"Upon my heart thy accents sweet, 

Of peace and pity, fell like dew 
On flowers half dead ; — thy lips did meet 

Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw 
Thy soft persuasion on my brain, 
Charming away its dream of pain. 

"We are not happy! sweet; our state 

Is strange and full of doubt and fear; 
More need of words that ills abate; 
Reserve or censure come not near 
Our sacred friendship, lest there be 
No solace left for thee and me."' 

Mary was devoted to the memory of her mother 
whom she had never seen, as she had died when 
Mary was born. Her step-mother, the second 
Mrs. Godwin, was not sympathetic to her, and 
one of Mary's favourite haunts was her mother's 
grave in St. Pancras churchyard, then situated 
among green fields, and not as now in the lap of 
railway termini. She would often sit there, read- 
ing and enjoying that solitude which is so hard 
to get among the living; and it is not improbable 
that Shelley was aware of her solitude. And, 
sentiment apart, could there have been a more 
[76] 






She/Icy and Mary Godwin 
appropriate altar for their love than the tomb of 
the brave woman who had courage when such 
unconventional courage as Mary Wollstonecraft's 
really meant something, not as now, when it is 
not only a drug in the market, but a hackneyed 
feminine device? 

To the dispassionate onlooker Mary Godwin 
may lack certain qualities which are popularly 
supposed to inspire great passions in men. There 
was a certain primness about her. She had been 
begotten, so to say, on revolutionary principles, 
and there was the taint of propaganda about her. 
Still Shelley, assuredly, had no distaste for prop- 
aganda, and Mary was a woman too. 

Any one capable of comprehending the situa- 
tion can well understand, and sympathize in, 
the joy Shelley must have felt at meeting, for the 
first time in his life, the positive — not merely 
the placidly corroborative — feminine of himself. 
Harriet had been the prettiest of mental parrots. 
But Shelley — who, for all his idealism, was no 
fool — knew that he had made her, knew that 
she was to him merely a ventriloquist's dummy 
of the mind. To meet a woman who could really 
[77] 






r 






1 



Old Love Stories Retold 
talk back to him, a woman who had not 
learnt all from him, a woman whose 
mind was no mere feminine clay in the 
hands of the masculine potter, and a 
woman, too, who was also — a woman, 
gifted with charm and mystery and 
motherhood! Surely Shelley, of all men, 
merited the true wife of himself. It was 
as absurd as it was unhappy that he 
should have mated with a plump, little, 
rose-pink schoolgirl like Harriet. And 
oh, the wonderful refreshment and stimu- 
lus of Mary ! 

A copy of " Queen Mab " is in exist- 
ence, given by Shelley to Mary, thus in- 
scribed : " Mary Wollstonccraft Godwin, 
P. B. S. . . . You see, Mary, I have not 
forgotten you." On a fly-leaf, at the 
end of the volume, is this impassioned 
avowal, in Mary's handwriting, dated 
July, 1814: "This book is sacred to me, 
and as no other creature shall ever look 
into it, I may write in it what I please — 
yet, what shall I write — that I love 




Shelley and Mary God-win 
the author beyond all powers of expres- 
sion, and that I am parted from him, 
dearest and only love. By that love we 
have promised to each other, although 
I may not he yours, I can never be an- 
other's. Hut I am thine, exclusively 
thine. 

"* By the kiss of love, the glance none saw beside, 
The smile none else might understand, 
The whispered thought of hearts allied, 
The pressure of the thrilling hand,' 

I have pledged myself to thee, and sacred 

is the gift. I remember your words — 

'You are now, Mary, going to mix with 

many, and, for a moment, I shall depart, 

hut in the solitude of your chamber I 

shall he with you ' - - yes, you are ever 

with me, sacred vision — 

"' Hut all! I feel in this was given 
A blessing never meant for me; 
Thou art too like a dream from heaven 
For earthly love to merit thee.'" 

Very soon Shelley was definitely to 
admit that there was no life for him apart 
from Mary. Harriet was out of London 
in July, and on July 14 Shelley wrote, beg- 



■ 



Old Love Stories Retold 
ging her to come to town. When she came, he 
opened his mind and heart to her. Their mar- 
riage was a failure, and he suggested that they 
should part, though he would, of course, con- 
tinue to provide for her, and saw no reason why 
they should not remain true and affectionate 
friends to each other. Harriet, who was ex- 
pecting her second child in December, was made 
quite ill by the disclosure, and, for some days, 
Shelley was distracted between tenderness and 
pity for her, and his love for Mary. Harriet, 
woman-like, threw all the blame on Mary, though 
we know that Mary was in no way the initial 
cause of Shelley's separation from Harriet, a 
separation to which it would seem Harriet had 
not explicitly agreed, though she may have ac- 
cepted it as the inevitable. The presence of her 
sister at her sick bedside would not help to mend 
matters, and, therefore, by July 27, 1814, Shelley 
and Mary had decided that they must act coura- 
geously, according to their own sense of right. 
Between four and five o'clock on the morning of 
July 28, 1814, Mary and Shelley — accompanied 
by Jane Clairmont, the second Mrs. Godwin's 
[80] 



Shelley and Mary Godwin 
daughter, by a former marriage — were starting 
for Dover, on their way to the Continent. Mary 
and Jane Clairmont left the house as if for a 
morning walk, and met Shelley at the corner of 
Hatton Garden, William Godwin having no 
suspicion of what was afoot. 

Shelley's account of their flight in his journal 
still heats like a heart with the breathless excite- 
ment, the tremulous joy and fear, of the occasion. 
Here are one or two extracts: 

" July 28 — The night preceding this morning, 
all being decided, I ordered a chaise to be ready 
by four o'clock. I watched until the lightning 
and the stars became pale. At length it was 
four. I believed it not possible that we should 
succeed; still there appeared to lurk some danger 
even in certainty. I went; I saw her; she came 
to me. Yet one quarter of an hour remained. 
Still some arrangement must be made, and she 
left me for a short time. How dreadful did this 
time appear; it seemed that we trifled with life 
and hope; a few minutes passed; she was in my 
arms — we were safe; we were on our road to 
Dover. . . . 

[SI] 






Old Love Stories Retold 

" At Dartford we took four horses, that 
we might outstrip pursuit. We arrived 
at Dover before four o'clock. Some 
time was necessarily expended in con- 
sideration — in dinner — in bargaining 
with sailors and custom-house officers. 
At length we engaged a small boat to 
convey us to Calais; it was ready by six 
o'clock. The evening was most beauti- 
ful; the sands slowly receded; we felt 
safe. ..." 

They had a stormy and even dangerous 
passage. Shelley continues: 

"Mary did not know our danger; she 
was resting, between my knees, that 
were unable to support her: she did not 
speak or look, but I felt that she was 
there. . . . The morning broke, the light- 
ning died away, the violence of the wind 
abated. We arrived at Calais, whilst 
Mary still slept; we drove upon the 
sands. Suddenly, the broad sun rose 
over France. 

" Friday, July 20 — 1 said, ' Mary, 










Shelley and Man Godwin 

look; the sun rises over France.' We 
walked over the sands to the inn. . . ." 

' - Marv, look; the sun rises over France." 
How full of hope and the exaltation of 
the new great life, at last really begun, 
are the words ! Nor was the future to dis- 
appoint the hopes of that happy dawn. 
Shelley and Mary had lived side by side 
for nearly eight years, when, on July 8, 
1822, death so cruelly separated them, 
and though, indeed, their married life 
was not without some passing shadows 
such as must occasionally darken even the 
closest and happiest union of two natures 
each so strongly individual, there never 
seems to have been a doubt in either 
heart that they were each other's true and 
final mate, and that they had done what 
life meant them to do in taking each other 
in defiance of the common usages of the 
world. Mary, indeed, is clearly seen to 
have been the ideal wife for Shelley, par- 
ticularly in the wisdom with which she 
took the occasional — purely Platonic — 

83 






Old Love Stories Retold 
passions for other women to which his poet's 
sensibility made him liable. Possibly his very 
enraptured feeling for the Countess Emilia 
Viviani made the greatest demands on Mary's 
powers of "understanding" him, but Mary loved 
his work too well to be jealous of a feeling that 
had inspired, perhaps, the loftiest love poem in 
English — "Epipsychidion." She knew of what 
a poet's heart is made, how passionately sensitive 
to beauty, how subject to passing emotional pos- 
sessions, and she knew that only so could a poet 
create for us his beautiful dreams. It was for a 
poet's wife to understand a poet's nature, and 
Mary understood. She knew that whatever 
light of beauty should attract his eyes for a 
moment, she was, as he had called her in the 
beautiful dedication to " The Revolt of Islam," 
— his " own heart's home " : 

"So now my summer task is ended, Mary, 
And I return to thee, mine own heart's home; 
As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faery, 
Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome. ..." 



[84] 



V 



John Keats and Fanny Brawne 



IT is surprising that the love stories of groat 
poets should so often disappoint the romantic 
— and, one may add, the aesthetic — sense. 
From such lovers of love, and such passionists 
of beauty, one naturally expects not only the 
ideal passion, but the ideal object. Of all poets 
one would say this of John Keats, the one poet 
whose name has come to be synonymous with 
beauty; and it is certainly a particularly ironical 
paradox that the lady irritatingly associated with 
his name should be the least congruous of all 
the many commonplace women transfigured by 
the genius they could not understand, and the 
love of which they were not worthy. Most 
women honoured by the love of great poets have 
at least been inoffensive, placidly pretty, domesti- 
cally devoted. They have been that, or they 
have been — devils. To both statements, there 
[85] 





Old hove Stories Retold 
are, of course, exceptions. Generally 
speaking, they have been neither beauti- 
ful nor intelligent. The poor poet, of 
course, thought they were both, — be- 
cause he was a poet. A poet would 
hardly be a poet if he did not make such 
divinely absurd mistakes, and one might 
almost state it as the first necessity of 
his being a poet at all that he should 
make that grand mistake about the 
woman he loves. In this respect, the 
English poets have been particularly, 
fortunate. Beatrice and Laura were in- 
deed graceful nonentities, but there is 
something dainty and distinguished about 
their names that allows us to think of 
them without impatience as decorative 
and docile adjectives to the great names 
with which they are pathetically linked. 
One could mention no few poets of other 
nations who have succeeded in giving 
the names of the women they loved a 
significance hardly second to their own. 
But with such exceptions as, say Shelley 

86 



"John Keats and Fanny Brawne 
and Browning, Rossetti and William 
Morris, the English poets have proved 
singularly unable to sing their loves up 
among the stars. Of course, there is — 
Ann Hathaway. And there is also — 
Fanny Brawne. 

Probably the reason of this is that most 
English poets have sprung from the 
middle classes, were born in the provinces, 
or lived in the suburbs. Beautiful women 
are born either among the very rich or 
the very poor. The English poet, as a 
rule, has been born between these ex- 
tremes, and his lines have fallen neither in 
Mayfair nor Whitechapel — but in Clap- 
ham. He has come in contact neither 
with the noble lady, nor the beautiful 
peasant. His German-silver fate has been 
the water colour miss of the academies 
for young ladies. Shelley met such a 
fate in silly little Harriet Westbrook, and 
Keats met another in the still sillier Fanny 
Brawne. 

Fame, that loves to humour its poets. 

87 






JSS 






' 


yV '" ■ .mn 1 














Old Love Stories Retold 
has consented to glorify the names of many un- 
important poor relations of genius, but there has 
never been a more insignificant name upon its 
lips than the name of Fanny Brawne. But John 
Keats loved a suburban miss of that name — and, 
perforce, Time, and perhaps even Eternity, must 
do her honour. One writes so, remembering not 
only the tortures to which she subjected a noble 
spirit with her dancing-class coquetries, but re- 
membering too this passage in Sir Charles Dilke's 
Memoirs of his grandfather: 

" Keats died admired only by his personal 
friends, and by Shelley; and even ten years after 
his death, when the first memoir was proposed, 
the woman he had loved had so little belief in his 
poetic reputation, that she wrote to Mr. Dilke, 
' The kindest act would be to let him rest for ever 
in the obscurity to which circumstances have 
condemned him.' " 

Ten years after his death the woman whom 
Endymion loved was still unable, not only to 
appreciate "the ode to a Grecian urn," but the 
immortal honour he had done her. Such an 
utterance makes one wish that Keats had lived 
[88] 



'John Keats and Fatmy Brawne 
:\ year or two longer, not lor the sake of his work 
— for he could have readied no higher perfec- 
tion — but to recover from an absurd infatuation, 
which began in calf-love and grew hysterical 
with the advance of inherited consumption. 
That Keats would have recovered from his 
suburban passion, and passed on to some higher 
and completer love, his letters to Fanny Brawne 
herself sufficiently prove. So long as he was 
comparatively well and occupied with poetry he 
absented himself from the felicity of her presence 
with a prosaic deliberation which must have 
seemed strangely unloverlike to " La Belle Dame 
Sans Merci." It was only when illness gave a 
neurotic intensity to all his feelings that Fanny 
Brawne gained a painful importance. The sick 
have many fancies. When Keats was himself, 
before that drop of arterial blood upon the sheet, 
which told the surgical-student poet that he must 
die, he wrote like this to his happily married 
brother George: "Notwithstanding your happi- 
ness and your recommendations, I hope I shall 
never marry: though the most beautiful creature 
were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a 
[89] 





Old Love Stories Retold 
walk; though the carpet were of silk, 
and the curtains of the morning clouds, 
the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet's 
down, the food manna, the wine beyond 
claret, the window opening on Winander- 
mere, I should not feel, or rather my 
happiness should not be, so fine; my 
solitude is sublime — for, instead of 
what I have described, there is a sub- 
limity to welcome me home; the roaring 
of the wind is my wife; and the stars 
through my window-panes are my chil- 
dren; the mighty abstract Idea of Beauty 
in all things, I have, stifles the more 
divided and minute domestic happiness. 
An amiable wife and sweet children I 
contemplate as part of that Beauty, but 
I must have a thousand of those beauti- 
ful particles to fill up my heart. . . . 
Those things, combined with the opin- 
ion I have formed of the generality 
of women, who appear to me as 
children to whom I would rather 
give a sugar-pl um tha n my time, form 



"John Keats and Fanny Brawne 

a harrier against matrimony which I 
rejoice in. . . ." 

Yet before this he had met a beautiful 
girl whom history would fain substitute 
for Fanny Brawne, and for whom awhile 
she was mistaken, a beautiful girl whom 
he thus vividly describes: "She is not a 
Cleopatra, hut is, at least, a Charmian: 
she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine 
eyes, and fine manners. When she comes 
into a room she makes the same impres- 
sion as the beauty of a leopardess. She is 
too fine and too conscious of herself to re- 
pulse any man who may address her: from 
habit she thinks that nothing particular. 
I always find myself more at ease with 
such a woman: the picture before me al- 
ways gives me a life and animation which 
I cannot possibly feel with anything in- 
ferior. I am, at such times, too much 
occupied in admiring to be awkward or 
in a tremble: I forget myself entirely, be- 
cause I live in her. You will, by this 
time, think I am in love with her. so, be- 




Old Love Stories Retold 
fore I go any further, I will tell you I am not. She 
kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's 
might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an 
amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than 
a conversation with an imperial woman, the very 
' yes ' and ' no ' of whose life is to me a banquet. I 
don't cry to take the moon home with me in my 
pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I 
like her, and her like, because one has no sensa- 
tions: what we both are is taken for granted." 

Critics for some time mistook this for a de- 
scription of Fanny Brawne, but it has since trans- 
pired that Keats was here describing a Miss 
Charlotte (or, according to Rossetti, Jane) Coxe. 

His first impression — or inventory — of Miss 
Brawne was, indeed, by no means so compli- 
mentary. 

" Shall I give you Miss ? She is about my 

height, with a fine style of countenance of the 
lengthened sort; she wants sentiment in every 
feature; she manages to make her hair look well; 
her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful; 
her mouth is bad and good; her profile is better 
than her full face, which, indeed, is not full, but 
[ 92 ] 




John Keats 



"John Keats and Fanny Brawne 
pale and thin, without showing any bone; her 
shape is very graceful, and so are her movements; 
her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet 
tolerable. She is not seventeen, but she is igno- 
rant; monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in 
all directions, calling people such names that I 
was forced lately to make use of the term — 
Minx: this is, I think, from no innate vice, but 
from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I 
am, however, tired of such style, and shall de- 
cline any more of it. She had a friend to visit 
her lately ; you have known plenty such — she 
plays the music, but without one sensation but 
the feel of the ivory at her fingers; she is a down- 
right Miss, without one set-off. We hated her, 
and smoked her, and baited her, and, I think, 
drove her away. Miss — — thinks her a paragon 
of fashion, and says she is the only woman in the 
world she would change persons with. What a 
shape, — she is as superior as a rose to a dande- 
lion. 

This verbal description tallies, almost with 
exactness, with the only extant portrait of Miss 
Brawne, a silhouette by M. Edouart, which Mr. 
[93] 





Old Love Stories Retold 
Sidney Colvin thus convincingly puts into 
words : " A brisk and blooming, very 
young beauty, of the far from uncommon 
English-hawk blonde type, with aquiline 
nose and retreating forehead, sharp-cut 
nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, shapely 
figure rather short than tall, a taking 
smile and good hair, carriage and com- 
plexion." 

It is rather a pity that Miss Brawne's 
letters have not been preserved, though 
it would not be difficult, I think, to 
imagine them. It is not necessary to 
be Keats to have received such colourless 
young-lady-like scrawls — which, poor 
fellow, he, doubtless, kissed and treas- 
ured, "even as you and I." Yet, it must 
not be thought that Miss Brawne was 
without character or parts. On the 
contrary, she seems, from Mr. Buxton 
Forman's naive description, to have been 
something like a virago of the accom- 
plishments. "She had the gift of in- 
dependence or self-suffieingness in a high 



*fohn Keats and Fanny Brawne 
degree, " says the good Mr. Forman, " and 

it was not easy to turn her from a settled 
purpose. Without being in general a sys- 
tematic student, she was a voluminous 
reai Km- in widely varying branches of lit- 
erature; and some out-of-the-way sub- 
jects she followed up with great perse- 
verance. One of her strong points of 
learning was the history of costume, in 
which she was so well read as to be able 
to answer any question of detail at a 
moment's notice. . . . She was an eager 
politician, with very strong convictions, 
fiery and animated in discussion; a 
characteristic she preserved till the end." 

Whatever else Fanny Brawne lacked, 
Mr. Forman wishes us to remember that 
"one of her strong points of learning was 
the history of costume, etc. . . ." —also 
that "she was an eager politician. . . ." 

() weep for Adonais! 

Mr. Forman is nothing if not gallant — 
but now it is perhaps time to remember 
that John Keats loved this Fanny Brawne. 


























- 










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\ \ 




\ ' 





















Old Love Stories Retold 

He loved her — yes ! — and yet ! 

Yes! In his second letter [10 July, 1819] he 
writes : " I never knew before, what such a love 
as you have made me feel, was; I did not believe 
in it; my Fanny was afraid of it, lest it should 
burn me up." 

In his third letter [27 July, 1819] he 
writes : " You absorb me in spite of myself — you 
alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure 
to what is call'd being settled in the world; I 
tremble at domestic cares — yet for you I would 
meet them, though if it would leave you the hap- 
pier I would rather die than do so. I have two 
luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveli- 
ness and the hour of my death. O that I could 
have possession of them both in the same minute." 

In the fifth letter, dated Winchester, August 
16th, however, we find that John Keats has been 
at Winchester four days, and yet has not written 
to his lady. With almost clumsy frankness — 
even harshness, as he admits — he confesses that 
poetry has got hold of him, with so imperious a 
preoccupation that he could at the moment no 
more write "soothing words" to Fanny Brawne 
[96] 



'John Keats and Fanny Brawne 

than if he were "engaged in a charge of cavalry." 
Continually afterwards we find him placing his 
work on his poems before her. He dare not see 
her lest she should distract him from his master- 
piece. And later, when he falls ill, we find him, 
for a lover, curiously cautious. He seems indeed 
to have been as careful of his health as of his 
poetry; for, although the two lovers lived next 
door to each other at Hampstead, Keats was so 
afraid of the perturbation of his lady's presence, 
that days and days went by without his ventur- 
ing to allow her to pay him a brief call; and he 
seems well content to have her written " Good- 
night," or to see her from his window. The only 
apparent vitality of his love was his unreasonable 
jealousy of his friend, Charles Brown; which was 
merely a sign of that coming neurosis through 
whose exaggeration Fanny Brawne was to seem 
so pathetically more important than she really 
was, or ever could have been, had he not been so 
sick a man. 

That Keats thought he loved Fanny Brawne 
his letters to others, rather than his official love- 
letters to her, vehemently, even hysterically, 
[97] 














\ 1 
















?« 






; 


Clll 






























18 











0/^/ £01^ Stories Retold 
prove. There is no doubt that he 
believed he was dying of — her ! To 
Charles Brown — the friend of whom 
he had been jealous, and yet to whom 
he wrote his last letters — he wrote on 
November 1, 1820: "As I have gone thus 
far into it, I must go on a little ; — per- 
haps it may relieve the load of wretched- 
ness which presses upon me. The per- 
suasion that I shall see her no more will 
kill me. My dear Brown, I should have 
had her when I was in health, and I 
should have remained well. I can bear 
to die — I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, 
God ! God ! God ! Everything that I have 
in my trunks that reminds me of her goes 
through me like a spear. The silk lining 
she put in my travelling cap scalds my 
head. My imagination is horribly vivid 
about her — I see her — I hear her. 
There is nothing in the world of sufficient 
interest to divert me from her a moment. 
. . . O that I could be buried near where 
she lives ! I am afraid to write to her — 




98 




"John Keats and Fanny Brawne 

to receive a letter from her — to see her 
handwriting would break my heart — 
even to hear of her anyhow, to see her 
name written, would be more than I can 
bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do ? 
Where can I look for consolation or ease? 
If I had any chance of recovery, this pas- 
sion would kill me." 

Also, there need be no doubt that, 
when Keats sailed from England for the 
last time, on the Maria Crowther, bound 
for Pisa, on September 18, 1820, he was 
thinking of Fanny Brawne as he wrote his 
last and greatest sonnet: 

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art! 

Nut in lone splendour hung aloft the night. 
And watching, with eternal lids apart. 

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, 
The moving waters at their priestlike task 

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, 
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask 

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors: 
No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, 

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, 
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell. 

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest. 
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, 
And so live ever — or else swoon to death." 




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Old Love Stories Retold 
It is strange to think that such infinitesimal 
femininity as Fanny Brawne should inspire a dying 
man to write such undying words — O ! why 
were they not written to Cleopatra — or " at 
least a Charmian ! " — but the heart of the poet 
is a divine mystery. 






[100] 



VI 



Heine and Mathilde 



THE love story of Heine and his Mathilde 
is another of those stories which fix a 
type of loving. It is the love of a man of the 
most brilliant genius, the most relentless, mock- 
ing intellect, for a simple, pretty woman, who 
could no more understand him than a cow can 
understand a comet. Many men of genius have 
loved just such women, and the world, of course, 
has wondered. How is it that men of genius 
prefer some little Mathilde, when the presidents 
of so many women's clubs are theirs for the ask- 
ing ? Perhaps the problem is not so difficult as, at 
first sight, it may seem. After all, a man of 
genius is much like other men. He is no more 
anxious than any other man to marry an encyclo- 
pedia, or a university degree. And, more than 
most men, he is fitted to realize the mysterious 
importance and satisfaction of simple beauty — 
[101] 





Old Love Stories Retold 

though it may go quite unaccompanied 
by " intellectual " conversation — and the 
value of simple woman-goodness, the 
woman-goodness that orders a household 
so skilfully that your home is a work of 
art, the woman-goodness that glories in 
that " simple " thing we call motherhood, 
the woman-goodness that is almost happy 
when you are ill because it will be so 
wonderful to nurse you. Superior per- 
sons often smile at these Mathildes of 
the great. They have smiled no little 
at Mathilde Crescence Mirat; but he 
who was perhaps the greatest mocker 
that ever lived knew better than to laugh 
at Mathilde. The abysses of his brain 
no one can, or even dare, explore — but, 
listen as we will at the door of that in- 
fernal pit of laughter, we shall hear no 
laugh against his faithful little Mathilde. 
It is not at Mathilde he laughs, but at 
the precious little blue-stocking, who 
freshened the last months of his life with 
a final infatuation — that still unidenti- 



Heine and Mathilde 
fied " Camille Selden" whom he play- 
fully called "la Mouche." 

" La Mouche," naturally, had a very 
poor opinion of Madame Heine, and you 
need not be a cynic to enjoy this passage 
with which she opens her famous remem- 
brances of "The Last Days of Ileinrich 
Heine " : 

" When I first saw Ileinrich Heine he 
lived on the fifth floor of a house situated 
on the Avenue Matignon, not far from 
the Rond-Point of the Champs-Elysees. 
His windows, overlooking the avenue, 
opened on a narrow balcony, covered in 
hot weather with a striped linen awning, 
such as appears in front of small cafes. 
The apartments consisted of three or four 
rooms — the dining-room and two rooms 
used by the master and the mistress of 
the house. A very low couch, behind a 
screen encased in wall-paper, several 
chairs, and opposite the door a walnut- 
wood secretary, formed the entire furni- 
ture of the inval id's ch amber. I nearly 




Old Love Stories Retold 
forgot to mention two framed engravings, dated 
from the early years of Louis Philippe's reign — 
the ' Reapers' and the ' Fisherman,' after Leopold 
Robert. So far the arrangements of the rooms 
evidenced no trace of a woman's presence, which 
showed itself in the adjoining chamber by a dis- 
play of imitation lace, lined with transparent 
yellow muslin, and a corner-cupboard covered 
with brown velvet, and more especially by a full- 
length portrait, placed in a good light, of Mme. 
Heine, with dress and hair as worn in her youth 
— a low-necked black bodice, and bands of hair 
plastered down her cheeks — a style in the fashion 
of about 1840. 

" She by no means realized my ideal Mme. 
Heine. I had fancied her refined, elegant, lan- 
guishing, with a pale, earnest face, animated by 
large, perfidious, velvety eyes. I saw, instead, 
a homely, dark, stout lady, with a high colour and 
a jovial countenance, a person of whom you 
would say she required plenty of exercise in the 
open air. What a painful contrast between the 
robust woman and the pale, dying man, who, 
with one foot already in the grave, summoned 
[ 104] 



Heine and Mathildc 
sufficient energy to earn not only enough for the 
daily bread, but money besides to purchase 
beautiful dresses. The melancholy jests, which 
obliging biographers constantly represent as 
Hashes of wit from a husband too much in love 
not to be profuse, never deluded anybody who 
visited that home. It is absurd to transform 
Mine. Heine into an idyllic character, whilst 
the poet himself never dreamed of representing 
her in that guise. Why poetize at the expense 
of truth ? — especially when truth brings more 
honour to the poet's memory." 

One is sorry that Heine has not risen again 
to enjoy this. One can easily picture his read- 
ing it and, turning tenderly to his ''Treasure," 
his " Heart's Joy," with that everlasting boy's 
look on his face, saying: "Never mind, Dam- 
schen. We know, don't we? They think they 
know, but we know." And with what a terrible 
snarl he would say, "My ideal Mme. Heine!" 

"My ideal Mme. Heine!" No doubt "la 

Mouche" thought she might have been that, had 

all the circumstances been different, had Heine 

not already been married for years and had he 

[105] 



Old Love Stories Retold 
not been a dying man. We may be 
quite sure what Heine would have thought 
of the matter, and quite sure what she 
was to him. Mathilde, we know, was 
unhappy about the visits of the smart 
young lady who talked Shakespeare and 
the musical glasses so glibly, and who 
held her husband's hand as he lay on his 
mattress-grave, and wore a general air 
of providing him with that intellectual 
companionship which was so painfully 
lacking in his home. Yet we who know 
the whole story, and know her husband 
far better than she, know how little she 
really had to fear from the visits 
of " Camille Selden." To Heine "la 
Mouche" was merely a brilliant flower, 
with the dew of youth upon her. His 
gloomy room lit up as she entered, and 
smelled sweet of her young womanhood 
hours after she had gone. But " the 
ideal Mine. Heine"? No! Heine had 
found his real Mine. Heine, the woman 
who had been faithful to him for years, 

106 





Heine and Mathilde 
had faced poverty and calumny with him, 
and had nursed him with laughing 
patience, day in and day out, for years. 
Heine had good reason for knowing how 
" the ideal Mme. Heine " would have 
treated him under such circumstances; 
for little bas-bleue " Mouche " had only 
to have a bad cold to stay away from the 
bedside of her hero, though she knew 
how he was counting the minutes to her 
coming, in the nervous, hysterical fashion 
of the invalid. One of his bitterest letters 
reproaches her with having kept him 
waiting in this way: 

" Tear my sides, my chest, my face, 
with red-hot pincers, flay me alive, shoot, 
stone me, rather than keep me waiting. 

"With all imaginable torture, cruelly 
break my limbs, but do not keep me wait- 
ing, for of all torments disappointed ex- 
pectation is the most painful. I expected 
thee all yesterday afternoon until six 
o'clock, but thou didst not come, thou 
witch, and I grew almost mad. Impa- 






Old Love Stories Retold 
tience encircled me like the folds of a viper, and 
I bounded on my couch at every ring, but oh! 
mortal anguish, it did not bring thee. 

"Thou didst fail to come; I fret, I fume, and 
Satanas whispered mockingly in my ear — ' The 
charming lotus-flower makes fun of thee, thou 
old fool!"' 

" Camille Selden " made the mistake of her 
life when she imagined that Heine loved her, 
and did not love that somewhat stout and high- 
coloured Mme. Heine who had such bad taste 
in lace and literature. 

Mathilde, as we know, was far from being 
Heine's first love. She was more important — 
his last. Heine himself tells us that from his 
boyhood he had been dangerously susceptible 
to women. He had tried many cures for the 
disease, but finally came to the conclusion that 
" woman is the best antidote to woman "- — though, 
" to be sure, this is driving out Satan with Beelze- 
bub." There had been many loves in Heine's 
life before, one day in the Quartier Latin, 
somewhere in the year 1835, he had met saucy, 
laughing Mathilde Crescence Mirat. There had 
[ 108 ] 



Heine and Mathildc 
been "red Sefchen," the executioner's daughter, 
whose red hair as she wound it round her throat 
fascinated Heine with its grim suggestion of 
blood. There had been his cousin Amalie, whose 
marriage to another is said to have been the secret 
spring of sorrow by which Heine's laughter was 
fed. And there had been others, whose names 
— imaginary, maybe, in that they were doubtless 
the imaginary names of real women — are 
familiar to all readers of Heine's poetry: Sera- 
phine, Angelique, Diane, Hortense, Clarisse, 
Emma, and so on. 

Hut she is loved best who is loved last; and 
when, after those months of delirious dissipation 
in Paris, which all too soon were to be so exor- 
bitantly paid for by years of suffering, Heine met 
Mathilde, there is no doubt at all that Heine met 
his wife. His reminiscent fancy might senti- 
mentalize about his lost Amalie, but no one can 
read his letters, not so much to, as about, Mathilde 
without realizing that he came as near to loving 
her as a man of his temperament can come near 
to loving any one. 

Though, to begin with, thev were not married 
[109] 






•■'" 




Old Love Stories Retold 
in the conventional sense, but " kept 
house" together in the fashion of the 
Quarter, there seems no question that 
Heine was faithful to Mathilde — to 
whom in his letters to his friends he al- 
ways referred as his " wife " — and that 
their relation, in everything but name, 
was a true marriage. Just before he 
met Mathilde, Heine had written to his 
friend and publisher, Campe, that he 
was at last sick to death of the poor 
pleasures which had held him too long. 
''I believe," he writes, "that my soul is 
at last purified of all its dross; hence- 
forth my verses will be the more beauti- 
ful, my books the more harmonious. At 
all events, I know this — that at the 
present moment everything impure and 
vulgar fills me with positive disgust." 

It was at this moment, disgusted with 
those common illusions miscalled pleas- 
ure, that Heine met Mathilde, and was 
attracted by what one might call the 
fresh elementalism of her nature. That 



Heine and Mathilde 

his love began with that hue intoxication 
of wonder and passion without which no 
love can endure, this letter to his friend 
August Lewald will show: "How can I 
apologize for not writing to you ? And 
you are kind enough to offer me the good 
excuse that your letter must have been 
lost. No, I will confess the whole truth. 
I duly received it — but at a time when 
I was up to my neck in a love affair that 
I have not yet got out of. Since October 
nothing has been of any account with me 
that was not directly connected with this. 
I have neglected everything, I see nobody, 
and give a sigh whenever I think of my 
friends. ... So I have often sighed to 
think that you must misunderstand my 
silence, yet I could not fairly set myself 
down to write. And that is all I can tell 
you to-day; for my cheeks are in such a 
flame, and my brain reels so with the scent 
of flowers, that I am in no condition to 
talk sensibly to you. 

" Did you ever read King Solomon's 




Old Love Stories Retold 
Song ? Just read it, and you will there find all 
I could say to-day." 

So wrote Heine at the beginning of his love. 
When that love had been living for eight years, he 
was still writing in no less lover-like a fashion. 
" My wife," says he to his brother Max in a letter 
dated April 12, 1843, " is a good child — natural, 
gay, capricious, as only French women can be, 
and she never allows me for one moment to sink 
into those melancholy reveries for which I have 
so strong a disposition." 

When Heine wrote this letter, Mathilde had 
been his "legal" wife for something like a year 
and a half. Heine had resorted to the formaliz- 
ing of their union under the pressure of one of 
those circumstances which compel a man to 
think more of a woman than of an idea. He was 
going to fight a duel with one of his and her 
cowardly German traducers, and that there 
should be no doubt of her position in the event 
of his death, he duly married her. Writing to 
his friend Lewald once more, on the 13th of 
October, 1841, he says: "You will have learned 
that, a few days before the duel, to make 
[112] 




1 1 ii II rich llrinr 



Heine and Mathilde 

Mathilde's position secure, I felt it right to turn 
my free marriage into a lawful one. This con- 
jugal duel, which will never cease till the death 
of one or the other of us, is far more perilous than 
any brief meeting with a Solomon Straus of Jew 
Lane, Frankfort." 

His friend Campe had been previously ad- 
vised of " my marriage with the lovely and honest 
creature who has lived by my side for years as 
Mathilde Heine, was always respected and looked 
upon as my wife, and was defiled by foul names 
only by some scandal-loving Germans of the 
Frankfort clique." 

Heine's duel resulted in nothing more serious 
than a flesh-wound on the hip. But alas! the 
wild months of dissipation before he had met 
Mathilde were before long to be paid for by that 
long, excruciating suffering which is one of the 
most heroic spectacles in the history of literature. 
It is the paradox of the mocker that he often dis- 
plays the virtues and sentiments which he mocks, 
much more manfully than the professional sen- 
timentalist. Courage and laughter are old friends, 
and Heine's laughter — his later laughter, at 
[113] 





Old Love Stories Retold 

least — was perhaps mostly courage. If 
for no other reason, one would hope for 
a hereafter — so that Charles II. and 
Heine may have met and compared notes 
upon dying. Heine was indeed an " un- 
conscionable long time a-dying," but 
then he died with such brilliant patience, 
with such good humour, and, in the 
meanwhile, contrived to write such haunt- 
ing poetry, such saturnine criticism. 

And, all the time, during those ten 
years of dying, his faithful " Treasure " 
was by his side. The people who " under- 
stood" him better, who read his books 
and delighted in his genius, somehow or 
other seemed to forget the lonely Prome- 
theus on the mattress-rock at No. 3 
Avenue Matignon. It was 1854 when 
Heine was painfully removed there. It 
was so long ago as the May of 1848 that 
he had walked out for the last time. His 
difficult steps had taken him to the 
Louvre, and, broken in body and nerves 
— but never in spirit — he had burst 



He i tic an (I Mathilde 
into tears before the Venus of Milo. It 
was a characteristic pilgrimage — though 

it was only a " Mouche " who could have 
taken Heine seriously when he said that 
he loved only statues and dead women. 
There was obviously a deep strain of the 
macabre and the bizarre in Heine's na- 
ture; but it must never be forgotten that he 
loved his Mathilde as well. 

That Heine was under no illusion about 
Mathilde, his letters show. He would 
laugh at her on occasion, and even be a 
little bitter; but if we are not to laugh at 
those we love, whom are we to laugh at ? 
So, at all events, thought Heine. Su- 
perior people might wonder that a man 
with Heine's " intellect," et cetera, could 
put up, day after day, with a little bour- 
geoise like Mathilde. But Heine might 
easily have retorted : " Where anywhere in 
the world are you going to find me a 
woman who is my equal, who is my true 
mate? You will bring me cultivated 
governesses, or titled ladies who preside 




Old hove Stories Retold 
over salons, or anemic little literary women with 
their imitative verse or their amateurish political 
dreams. No, thank you. I am a man. I am a 
sick, sad man. I need a kind, beautiful woman 
to love and take care of me. She must be beauti- 
ful, remember, as well as kind — and she must 
be not merely a nurse, but a woman I can love. 
If she shouldn't understand my writings, what 
does it matter ? We don't marry a wife for that. 
I am not looking for some little patronizing blue- 
stocking — who, in her heart, thinks herself a 
better writer than myself — but for a simple 
woman of the elements, no more learned than a 
rose, and as meaningless, if you will, as the rising 
moon." 

Just such a woman Heine found in his Mathilde, 
and it is to be remembered that for years before 
the illness which left him, so to speak, at her 
mercy, he had loved and been faithful to her. 

There are letters which seem to show that 
Mathilde had the defects of those qualities of 
buxom light-heartedness, of eternal sunshine, 
which had kept a fickle Heine so faithful. Some- 
times, one gathers, she as little realized the 
[116] 



Heine and Mathilde 
tragedy of Heine's suffering as she understood 
his writings. As such a woman must, she often 
left Heine very lonely; and seemed to feel more 
for her eat, or her parrot " Cocotte," than her 
immortal, dying husband. 

"Oh, what a night we have had!" Heine 
exclaimed one day to his friend Meissner. " I 
have not been able to close an eye. We have had 
an accident in our house; the eat fell from the 
mantelpiece and scratched her right ear; it even 
bled a little. That gave us great sorrow. My 
good Mathilde remained up and applied cold 
poultices to the cat all night long. For mc she 
never remains awake." 

And another time, he said, even more bitterly, 
to another friend: "I felt rather anxious yester- 
day. My wife had finished her toilet as early as 
two o'clock and had gone to take a drive. She 
promised to be back at four o'clock. It struck 
half-past five and she had not got back yet. The 
clock struck eight and my anxiety increased. 
Had she, perhaps, got tired of her sick husband. 
and eloped with a cunning seducer ? In my pain- 
ful doubt I sent the sick-nurse to her chamber to 
[117] 




: 




Old hove Stories Retold 
see whether ' Coeotte ' the parrot was 
still there. Yes, ' Coeotte ' was still 
there. That set me at ease again, and 
I began to breathe more freely. With- 
out ' Coeotte ' the dear woman would 
never go away." 

A great man like Heine must neces- 
sarily have such moods about a little 
woman like Mathilde; but the important 
fact remains that for some twenty years 
Heine was Mathilde's faithful husband, 
and that the commonplace, pretty, igno- 
rant, pleasure-loving, bourgeoise Mathilde 
was good and faithful to a crippled, in- 
comprehensible mate. Perhaps, after 
all, the wonder in this marriage is even 
more on the side of Mathilde than of 
Heine. Think what such a woman must 
have had to forego, to suffer, to " put up 
with," with such a man — a man, re- 
member, whose real significance must 
have been Chinese to her. Surely, all 
of us who truly love love by faith, and 
the love of Heine for Mathilde, and of 

118 





Heine and Mathilde 
Mathilde for Heine, alike is only to be 
explained by that mysterious explanation 
— faith. 

That Heine understood his love for 
Mathilde, so far as any man of genius can 
understand his love, and was satisfied 
with it so far as any man of genius can he 
with any love, we may be quite sure. His 
many letters about her, and to her, prove 
it. All the elemental simplicities of her 
nature — the very bourgeoise traits which 
made his friends wonder — alike inter- 
ested him, and drew him closer toward 
her. When she weaves a rug for his 
friend Lewald, how seriously he takes it ! 
He could laugh at all things in heaven 
and earth, but when Mathilde weaves a 
rug for his friend he takes life seriously. 

How "domestic" Heine could be is 
witnessed by a letter of his — to Mathilde 
from Hamburg in 18 L 23 — in regard to her 
buying a hat for his sister and another for 
his niece — giving careful directions as 
to style and price. Mathilde and he had 

' 
■'■• 






Old Love Stories Retold 
then been each other's for over eight years, but 
none the less — nay, let us say all the more — 
he ended his letter: "Adieu! I think only of thee, 
and I love thee like the madman that I am." 

Perhaps the truest proof of Heine's love for 
Mathilde is the way in which, in his will, he 
nattered his despicable cousin, Carl Heine, for 
her sake, so that she might not suffer any loss of 
his inheritance. There is no doubt that Heine 
knew the worth of his Mathilde. If so terrible 
a critic of human nature was satisfied to love 
and live with her for so many years, we may be 
sure that Mathilde was a remarkable woman. 
She didn't indeed talk poetry and philosophy, 
like little " Mouche," but then the women who 
do that are legion ; and Mathilde was one of those 
rarer women who are just women, and love they 
know not why. 

In saying this, we mustn't forget that " Camille 
Selden" said it was ridiculous to sentimentalize 
about Mme. Heine. Yet, at the same time, we 
must remember Heine's point of view. When 
" Camille Selden " first sought his acquaintance, 
he had been living with Mathilde for some 
[ 120] 



He hie and Mathilde 

twenty years. Men of genius — and even ordi- 
nary men — are not apt to live with women they 
do not love for twenty years; and that Heine did 
perhaps the one wise thing of his life in marrying 
his Mathilde there can be very little doubt. 

To a man such as Heine a woman is not so 
much a personality as a beautiful embodiment 
of the elements : " Earth, air, fire and water met 
together in a rose." If she is beautiful, he will 
waive "intellectual sympathy"; if she is good, 
he will not mind her forgetting the titles of his 
books. When she becomes a mother, he — 
being a man of genius — understands that she 
is a more wonderful being than he can ever hope 
to be. 

Much has been said about the unhappy mar- 
riages of great writers. The true reason too 
often has been that they have married literary 
amateurs instead of women and wives. Heine 
was wiser. No one would, of course, pretend 
that Mathilde was his mate. But, then, what 
woman could have been ? Certainly not that 
little literary prig he called his " Mouche." 

[121] 




•^^^^^^^s-^^^^ysj^^s^^^-^^^.^^^^is^^^es^ 







VII 



Ferdinand Lassalle and 
Helene von Donniges 



r 



THERE are two women still living 
somewhere in the world whom I 
always think of as figures peculiarly 
tragic, and whom I often find myself 
thinking of together. They are both 
women with historic love stories, and 
love stories — here is the link of associa- 
tion between them — in which not only 
their own destinies were concerned but 
great national issues disastrously in- 
volved. There was a moment, a few 
years ago, when it really seemed possible 
that Ireland's long dream of freedom 
was about to come true. Parnell's pa- 
tient strength had suddenly found a 
Titanic ally in Gladstone's tremendous 

122 




Lass all e and He I cue von Dbnn/grs 
moral prestige, and for a brief moment 
the issue hung tremulous in the scales of 
Time. It was a fateful moment in 
Ireland's history which can hardly come 
again. It was her one desperate oppor- 
tunity in a hundred years. How and 
why she lost it, the world well knows. 

The story of Ferdinand Lassalle and 
Helene Von Donniges is similarly the 
story of a "lost leader" and his great 
passion; and, if the fall of Parnell was the 
deathblow to Irish liberty, who shall say 
what the great democratic movement 
throughout the world has lost by the 
tragically frivolous death of Lassalle ? 
He, too, fell at one of those fortunate, 
fateful moments in the history of a great 
cause when the moment can only be 
seized by some magnetic, masterful leader 
and if not so seized is lost, the advance 
that might have been made indefinitely 
postponed, and even the ground already 
won reconquered by reaction. 

In remarking these tragic interfer- 



T~" 7— ",~ 






Old Love Stories Retold 
ences of the passion of love in national destinies, 
it is, I hope, needless to say that none but narrow 
natures can feel bitterly toward the sad women 
so disastrously beloved, or hold the absurd doc- 
trine that public men should keep themselves 
aloof from the inspiring passions of our common 
nature. I say " inspiring " advisedly, for whereas 
such stories as the one I have to retell illustrate 
the sheer malignity of ill-luck which sometimes 
attends the loves of even private, as well as pub- 
lic, persons, the instances are far more numerous 
where lives of great public usefulness have been 
throughout secretly nourished and inspired by 
the love that moves not only the sun and stars 
but even parliaments and field-guns. 

Thus is a man created — to do all his work for some 

woman, 
Do it for her, and her only, only to lay at her feet; 
Yet in his talk to pretend, shyly and fiercely maintain it, 
That all is for love of the work — toil just for love of the 

toil. 
Yet was there never a battle, but side by side with the 

soldiers, 
Stern like the serried corn, fluttered the souls of the 

women, 
As in and out through the corn go the blue-eyed shapes 

of the flowers: 

[ 12^ ] 



Lassalle and Helene -von Donniges 

Yet was there never a strength but a woman's softness 

upheld it, 
Never a Thebes of our dreams, but it rose to the music of 

women — 
Iron and steel it might stand, but the women had breathed 

on the building: 
Yea, no man shall make or unmake, ere some woman 

hath made him a man. 

One occasionally encounters in history a great 
career in which woman has played no such part, 
but the rule unquestionably is that the great er 
personalities of the world, whether they be states- 
men, soldiers, artists, or even philosophers, have 
been exceptionally subject to the influence of 
woman. Of no famous man has this ever been 
truer than of Lassalle. Years before he met 
Helene von Donniges he was as well known for 
his love affairs as his politics; for, strikingly hand- 
some and masterful, he possessed, too, just that 
dash and brilliancy which women find irresistible. 

He was born on April 11, 1825, in Breslau, 
Prussia, of Jewish parents, and himself outwardly 
always professed the Jewish religion. His father, 
beinjr a merchant, had destined him for a busi- 
ness career, but the son's inclinations were in 
other directions, and he went to the university 
f 125 1 










Old Love Stories Retold 
instead. Philosophy and philology were 
the studies most attractive to him. From 
the university he went to Diisseldorf, 
and thence to Paris, where, at the age of 
nineteen, he made the acquaintance of 
Heine, who, with his customary insight, 
divined the force and significance of his 
nature, and, with his customary aptness, 
found for him the appropriate phrase. He 
was born to die like a gladiator, he said, 
with a smile on his lips. A gladiator 
indeed he was, though it was hardly a 
gladiator's death a blundering destiny 
called upon him so ignominiously and 
wastefully to die. So impressed was 
Heine with the work he deemed Lassalle 
capable of doing, that he even hailed him 
as "The Messiah of the Nineteenth 
Century." 

As Lassalle's public life ends with the 
name of a woman, so does it begin. 
From Paris Lassalle returned to Diissel- 
dorf, and there made the acquaintance 
of a woman who was to be intimately 



Lassalle and Helene von Donm'ges 
associated with him continuously till his 
death. This was the Countess Hatzfeldt, 

a woman who was suffering at the hands 
of a brutal husband just such a wrong as 
was calculated to set Lassalle's chival- 
rous, combative nature on fire. Count 
Hatzfeldt, a dissolute nobleman of im- 
mense wealth, lived openly with his mis- 
tress. Baroness von Meyerdorf, at his 
castle near Diisseldorf; and his Countess, 
who had left him, taking her two children 
with her, tried in vain to obtain a divorce 
and a suitable settlement for herself and 
the children. On becoming her friend, 
Lassalle took up the fight with charac- 
teristic energy, a fight which was to 
last nine years, — and won it at last by 
his brilliant and patient advocacy. Mean- 
while, Lassalle lived with the Countess in 
her Diisseldorf home, and one cannot 
wonder that the world had something to 
say on the matter, for, though indeed the 
Countess was twice his age, a beautiful 
woman of thirty-eight might well be 




Old Love Stories Retold 
something more than a mother to a handsome 
young man of nineteen. 

During these years Lassalle also threw him- 
self vehemently into polities, becoming one of 
the leaders of the Social-Democratic party, and 
undergoing a six-months' imprisonment for one 
of his daring speeches. At the conclusion of the 
Countess' case he was a marked man, and uni- 
versally regarded as one of the most powerful and 
dangerous personalities in the Liberal camp. 
The Countess and he now left Dtisseldorf, and 
settled in Berlin, where Lassalle speedily made 
a place for himself in the best intellectual society 
of the capital. Humboldt called him a " Wunder- 
kind," and became his close friend; and Bis- 
marck, though so opposed to his political theo- 
ries, made no secret of his admiration for his 
great gifts, and of the interest he took in his 
conversation. 

Although, as I have said, Lassalle was highly 
susceptible to the charms of women, none of his 
earlier love affairs seem to have taken any serious 
hold upon him. The women to whom he made 
love were aware that ambition held the first 
[ 128] 



Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 
place in his heart, and he took care to make it 
clear that marriage did not enter into the scheme 
of his life. 

One story goes, however, that some two years 
before he met Helene, the possible charm of the 
married state had been momentarily revealed to 
him by a brief attachment to a young Russian 
lady named Sophie SolutzefF. But Sophie, it is 
said, while admiring Lassalle as a genius, was 
not drawn to him as a lover, and his own feeling 
for her being half-hearted, the relationship died a 
natural death. An acute critic of Lassalle's story 
(Mr. Clement Shorter in his interesting intro- 
duction to Mr. George Meredith's "Tragic 
Comedians") throws discredit at this tale, com- 
ing as it does through Countess Hatzfeldt, who, 
as will be seen later, had her own reasons for 
wishing to show that the passion which proved 
fatal to Lassalle was no isolated experience in his 
life, but rather one of a number and of a nature 
to which his friends were so accustomed that they 
grew naturally to underrate their seriousness. 
Those friends, alas! from first to last were to play 
an unfortunate part in the tragedy — no doubt, 
[ 129] 






Old Love Stories Retold 
after the manner of friends, with the best 
intentions. It was friends who, before 
Ferdinand Lassalle and Helene von 
Donniges had met or even heard of each 
other, prepared them to fall into each 
other's arms by stimulating Helene's 
curiosity in a certain brilliant and 
dangerous "Lassalle." Why, they were 
so evidently born for each other! They 
must meet! 

"Surely you know Lassalle?" said 
young Baron Korff to Helene at a ball, 
one evening in 1862. "Only a woman 
who knows him, and shares his opinions, 
can speak like that!" 

But Helene apparently had never even 
heard the name of the man who was 
soon to mean so much in her life. 

" Then I pity you both every hour 
that you remain apart, for you were 
made for each other, " was Korff' s 
prophetic reply. 

Again, at a dinner-party, Dr. Karl 
Oldenbere had exclaimed: "You are the 




130 



m 



Lassalle and Helene von D'dnmges 

only woman I ever met who seems fitted 
to be Lassalle's wife!" 

If only other friends of the two fated 
ones had realized their ordained affinity, 
their story might have been different; and 
what wonder, with such stimulating pre- 
dictions in her mind, that Helene — prac- 
tised coquette, too, as she already was — 
should have developed a mood of inflam- 
matory expectancy for the moment when 
she did actually meet her man of destiny. 

That fateful meeting at last took place 
at an evening party given by a friend, 
Fran Hirsemenzel, who was in Helene's 
confidence, and so dramatically instan- 
taneous was their recognition of affinity 
that their fellow guests were conscious 
of it, too, and remembered the electrical 
flash and suddenness of it years after. 

" And this is how you look ! This is 
you ! Yes, yes, it is as I thought, and it is 
all right!" were Lassalle's first words, as 
he looked at her, even before they had 
been introduced to each other. Intro- 



r 




1S1 





Old Love Stories Retold 
duced! What need had they of introduc- 
tion ! 

" What is the use ? " Lassalle had added, lay- 
ing his hand on her arm. " We know each other 
already. You know who I am; and you are 
' BrUnhilde,' Adrienne Cardoville, the ' fox ' Korff 
has told me about — in one word — Helene ! " 

Never was such a whirlwind wooing. Helene 
felt herself, as Meredith phrases it, " carried off 
on the back of a centaur." Each felt so abso- 
lutely and irrevocably each other's that formali- 
ties seemed silly. Lassalle spoke to Helene with 
the familiar "Du," as though they had been 
each other's for years, and when the party broke 
up at four in the morning, he carried her in his 
arms down the steps of the house, — and yet 
even to her chaperon, a lady quite demure and 
strict in her opinions, it all seemed the natural 
thing to do — as, of course, it was. 

"It was rather bold and unusual," this lady 
had said afterward, " but if he had taken you by 
the hand, and walked off with you altogether, I 
should not have thought it strange; you seemed 
to belong to each other so entirely." 
[ 132 ] 



Lass a He and Helefie von Donniges 

In fact, Lassalle and Helene had acted with 
the simplicity of a great feeling, and such sim- 
plicity always brings with it its own fitness, and, 
however astonishing, compels our respect, like 
any other masterful play of the elements. 

Nature had thus manifestly joined these two 
people. It was now for man to put them asunder. 

Lassalle was for immediately making formal 
application for her hand, but Helene, with that 
vacillation which was to prove their ruin, begged 
him to wait. She was already aware of the 
probable attitude of her family toward Lassalle. 
When she had first heard his name, she had in- 
quired about him of her grandmother, with 
whom she was living in Berlin, and had been 
told that he was a shameless demagogue, whom 
it would be impossible for her to know. Stories, 
too, about his relations with Countess Hatzfeldl 
had been brought to her; and how her father, a 
stern old aristocrat, high in the diplomatic ser- 
vice, would entertain the idea of an alliance with 
the Socialist Messiah she could surmise. 

Besides, she was already half engaged to a 
young Wallachian prince, Yanko von Racowitza, 
I 1331 



I 



Old Love Stories Retold 
a gentle lad, whom she treated much 
like a pet animal, and called her " Moorish 
page." Yanko was the last of a long 
series of amourettes which had no doubt 
somewhat sapped her power of serious 
loving. He was an engaging companion, 
a fine musician, and her devoted slave, 
fetching and carrying for her, and obe- 
dient to her every whim. There is 
something appealingly pathetic about 
this young prince, and of all the secondary 
actors in the tragedy now about to be- 
gin, he is the only gracious, if piteous, 
figure. 

Helene was nineteen and Lassalle 
thirty-eight when they first met. Their 
second meeting did not take place for 
some months. Meanwhile, Helene's 
family had " cut " the lady at whose 

house the first eventful meeting had 

i 

taken place, and Lassalle had tried in 

vain to see her. Chance brought them 

together again at a concert in Berlin. 

Helene was then with Lawyer Holthoff 




Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 

and his wife, old friends of her family, and 
friends, too, of Lassalle. The Holtlioffs, 
therefore, played good angels to the lovers, 
and several times connived at their meet- 
ing, with the result that their first feeling 
for each other was confirmed and deep- 
ened. Still, Helene weakly kept up her 
relationship with Yanko, telling him, 
however, that if ever Lassalle should want 
her, she would break their engagement, 
and give up everything, to go to him. 
Yanko docilely accepted the situation, 
saving she must do what was best for her 
own happiness. If the issue had been 
left to poor Yanko, our lovers would never 
have been tragic comedians. 

Hut sterner and more selfish personali- 
ties than Helene's Moorish page were 
soon to be engaged on both sides, and 
even friends who wished their story well 
were to blunder on their behalf. Ilolt- 
hoff, surely with the best will in the world, 
had approached Helene's grandmother in 
Lassalle's interest. The grandmother had 











?£■ 



Old Love Stories Retold 
written to Herr von Donniges, and from him had 
come an uncompromising refusal to consider 
Lassalle's offer under any circumstances. The 
idea of his daughter marrying one who was at 
once a Jew and a " shameless demagogue " would 
naturally seem preposterous to him. 

At this point of the story it is impossible not 
to feel a certain lull in the feelings of both lovers. 
For several months they were both within reach 
of each other in Berlin, and, though no doubt 
there were social difficulties in the way of their 
meeting, they do not seem to have been insu- 
perable. Yet they never met, though they 
continued to hear of each other through the Holt- 
hoffs. When one remembers their first fiery 
meeting, with all its wild vows, and then sees 
these months going by, with Helene apparently 
content with her life as a social butterfly, and 
Lassalle whole-heartedly absorbed in his political 
career, we cannot help wondering if the two were, 
after all, as much in love as they thought. For, 
when they really wished to meet, there seems to 
have been no trouble about arranging it, as be- 
fore, through the Holthoffs. Lassalle's sister, 
[13G] 






Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 
Frau von Friedland, was on a visit to Berlin, and 
desired to meet Helene, so Helene and she met, 
to their mutual liking, at the Holthoffs'. 

Presently it was suggested that Helene should 
eall Herr Holthoff from his library. On opening 
the door she found him there — with Lassalle. 

From this interview we miss the splendid im- 
patience of the night of the whirlwind wooing. 
A leisurely diplomacy had taken its place. It 
was March now — March, 1863. Helene had 
just had a birthday, which Lassalle had remem- 
bered with violets and rosebuds and a poem. 
When the summer came, he was, as if accident- 
ally, to make the acquaintance of Helene's 
parents, and rely on his conquering charm to 
win them round. 

When the summer did come, Helene was 
busily nursing her grandmother, who remained 
ill all the rest of the year, and died early in the 
winter; and, also in that summer, with that 
culpably frivolous vacillation which character- 
ized her throughout, she had, strangely enough, 
formally betrothed herself to Yanko von Raco- 
witza. After the grandmother's death, Helene 
[137] 



Old Love Stories Retold 

returned with her mother to Geneva, 
where the family now lived, Herr von 
Donniges having been appointed charge 
d'affaires at Berne. In March, 1864, 
Yanko joined them, and, with his pleasant 
ways and various social accomplishments, 
won himself into the good graces of Herr 
von Donniges and the whole family 
circle. 

In May, Helene fell ill with a fever, and 
on her convalescence, still being weak and 
nervous, she was sent by her doctor to a 
mountain resort near Berne, where she 
lived with some English and American 
friends. 

Meanwhile, Lassalle had been working 
like a giant, fighting lawsuits with which 
the government vainly attempted to para- 
lyze his political activity, founding his 
great Working Men's Society, and mak- 
ing an almost regal campaign through 
the country, punctuated with daring 
speeches and wild popular enthusiasm. 
For one of these speeches he was Jjen- 

138 





Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 
tenced to a year's imprisonment, which 
his brilliant appeal succeeded in reduc- 
ing to six months. Pending his imprison- 
ment, however, feeling the need of rest 
after the long strain upon his energies, he 
sought his favorite retreat, Rigi-Kalthad, 
in Switzerland. 

He had been there a few days, when, 
one afternoon — the afternoon of July 
25, 1804 — while he was busy on his cor- 
respondence with his political colleagues, 
a message was brought to him that a lady 
wished to see him. It was Helene. She 
had ridden up the mountain with her two 
lady friends, having heard from the 
friendly Holthoff that Lassalle was stay- 
ing there. 

Lassalle proceeded with the party to 
Rigi-Kulm, where they were to spend the 
night and see the sunrise. But they were 
to be disappointed of their sunrise by a 
fog. " How often," Helene writes in her 
subsequent reminiscences, " when in later 
years I have stood upon the summit of 



139 







Old Love Stories Retold 
Rigi, and seen the day break in all its splendour, 
have I recalled this foggy, damp morning, and 
Lassalle's disappointment." 

On this occasion, they discussed their future 
more seriously than ever before, and though 
Helene still pleaded for further compromise in- 
stead of an immediate marriage, which Lassalle 
strongly urged as their wisest course, she seems 
on this occasion to have been braced by contact 
with his strong spirit into a mood of firmness 
which promised him loyalty against whatever 
opposition. They parted, elate and confident 
in the power of their love to win their battle. 

At every stage of her journey, the post and the 
telegraph brought her fiery and tender messages 
from her lover, and three days later Lassalle him- 
self followed her to Wabern. Meanwhile, she 
had written him a passionate letter in which she 
solemnly promised to become his wife, whatever 
difficulties might stand in their way. 

" You said to me yesterday : ' Say but a sensible 

and decided " yes ! " — et je me charge du reste. 

Good: I say "yes" — chargez vous done du reste. 

I only require that we first do all in our power to 

[140 1 



Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 
win my parents to a friendly attitude. To me 
belongs, however, a painful task. I must slay in 
cold blood the true heart of Yanko von Raco- 
witza, who has given me the purest love, the 
noblest devotion. With heartless egotism I must 
destroy the day-dream of a noble youth. But, 
for your sake, I will even do what is wrong." 

For eight days, Lassalle and Helene were at 
Wabern together — eight days of happy, unin- 
terrupted companionship — in which, as they 
learnt more and more of each other, every moment 
taught them how unerring had been their first 
swift sense of their instinctive affinity. In Helene 
Lassalle found that exquisitely 'Hatched wife of 
heart and brain, of spirit and sense, who is the 
dream of every man of genius — a dream not 
fulfilled once in a hundred years; and in Lassalle 
Helene had found her "eagle of men," that 
dominating, strong lord of her life, who was her 
dream, as he is the dream of every woman, but 
of whose existence her girl's career of easy con- 
quest had made her somewhat confidently skep- 
tical. Life seldom brings together two human 
beings so absolutely mated, so surely born for 
[141] 













Old Love Stories Retold 
each other. It was elated with a very 
solemn sense of this union that Helene 
and Lassalle bade each other good-by 
at Wabern station on the morning of 
August 3, 1864. Helene was due at 
Geneva at two o'clock, Lassalle was to 
follow by a later train. " Here end my 
happy memories," is Helene's sigh in 
her record of this time. Neither indeed 
could have thought that before August 
had ended Lassalle would have done 
with work and dreams, and that the 
rooms of the Working Men's Society in 
Dtisseldorf, as he had strangely prophe- 
sied, would be "hung in black." 

Helene found her family in festival 
spirits, and her mother in an unwonted 
mood of tenderness, owing to the recent 
betrothal of her sister Margaretha to 
Count Kayserling. Alas ! this rare genial- 
ity not unnaturally prompted Helene to 
take a false step against which Lassalle 
had specifically warned her. She con- 
fided in her seldom-softened mother — 






Lassalle and Helene von Dbnniges 
with the result that, as with the advent 
of sonic wicked fairy, all the merriment 
suddenly fled with shrieking, and with 
horror-lifted hands. An alliance with 
that unspeakable Jew, that shameless 
demagogue! Why, the mere thought of 
it was enough to frighten away the ar- 
duously captured count! How could she, 
abandoned girl, ruin her sister's pros- 
pects, and smirch the social record of the 
whole family! The father, called to the 
rescue, made a terrifying scene, heaped 
filthy slanders on Lassalle's name, and 
forbade Helene to leave the house. 

The battle had now begun in real 
earnest, and her father's violence finally 
awakened Helene to the radical impos- 
sibility of her dreams of peaceable com- 
promise. Lassalle was right. There was 
only one way, and here Helene rose 
strongly to the situation, and acted with 
instant resolution and courage. Lassalle 
was to have left Wabern for Geneva by 
a train starting a few hours later than 



■ 



^ 




Old Love Stories Retold 
Helene's, and on raising the storm at home, but 
before her father's interference, she had imme- 
diately despatched a letter by her maid to meet 
him on his arrival. Her father's treatment, how- 
ever, decided her to leave home instantly, and, 
once for all, to unite her life with Lassalle's. 
Slipping some money and a small dagger into 
her pocket, she managed to escape from the 
house unobserved, and arrived at Lassalle's hotel 
just as he was reading her letter. He received 
her somewhat sternly, reproaching her for having 
disobeyed him by the confidence in her mother; 
and, to her intense astonishment and disappoint- 
ment, refused to go away with her, though he 
himself, during the days they had just spent to- 
gether, had pleaded so forcibly for that very 
course. He insisted that she should return home, 
and leave him to win her from her parents — a 
feat which, with his sublime confidence in him- 
self, he was sure of accomplishing. Helene, still 
vibrating with the scene she had just gone through, 
and too truly measuring the force of the resistance 
to be encountered, endeavoured to convince Las- 
salle of the utter hopelessness of his attempt, and 
[ 144] 



Lassalle and Helene voti Dowiiges 

besought him with tears to take advantage of the 
moment. 

But, alas, Lassalle's fighting-blood was up, 

and his haughty pride on its mettle. Arrogantly 
sure of his strength, fatally underestimating the 
task before him, he remained obdurate, and 
presently eseorted Helene to the house of a lady 
who was not only Helene's own friend, but a 
friend, too, of the family. They had hardly ar- 
rived there when Helene's mother and sister also 
arrived. Lassalle declared the meeting most 
opportune, and immediately applied all his fa- 
mous resources of persuasive eloquence to the 
situation, only to prove how right Helene's judg- 
ment had been. Lassalle's usually victorious 
arts were not only utterly wasted on Frau von 
Donniges, but that lady assailed and insulted 
him in the most violent and contemptuous fashion. 
Helene, thus more than ever confirmed in her 
foresight, again begged him, in her mother's 
presence, to take her away with him, but alas! 
the gods had already bound his eyes for the stroke 
of his doom, and he paid no heed. Though Frau 
von Donniges insolently told him that, should he 
[ 145 ] 








Old Love Stories Retold 
attempt to call on her husband, the ser- 
vants would throw him out of the house, 
and that, should he write, his letters would 
be returned unopened, he still maintained 
a pacificatory attitude of punctilious 
courtesy, and still insisted on surrender- 
ing Helene to the care of such a mother, 
with a fanatical gallantry which was no 
doubt very satisfying to his pride, but 
which was certainly most disastrously 
ill-timed. Helene's eagle among men 
had indeed made a very unaquiline mis- 
take. Here, if ever, was his moment to 
swoop and carry the white lamb of the 
house of von Donniges safe to his un- 
scalable eyrie. But no! he chose instead 
to pose picturesquely in an attitude of 
nobly surrendering a prey which it was 
obviously in his power any moment to 
recapture. Nothing, indeed, would sat- 
isfy his aquiline pride but that the family 
which had dared thus to scorn him should 
beg him upon its knees to do it the honour 
of flying away with one of its daughters! 



if 




Lassalle and Helen von Donn/ges 
The image does indeed not unfairly repre- 
sent the hopelessness of the demands of 
his pride. There was to be a conflict of 
wills. His could not fail to he the stronger. 
"I give you back your child," said he, 
magnificently, to Frau von Donniges. 
" Listen to me. I, who can do with your 
daughter what I wish, resign her to your 
care, but only for a short time. She goes 
with you because I wish her to; never for- 
get that. And now, farewell!" 

Then, turning to Helene, and tenderly 
embracing her, he said: " Farewell, for a 
little while! What you are doing for me 
now, I will never forget. I can never 
thank you enough for your compliance. 
I require nothing more from your will, 
your strength. I know this is much to 
ask; all the rest is my affair. Do not 
allow yourself to be maltreated; otherwise, 
submit to what is required of you. I 
shall know all that happens, and on the 
slightest ill-treatment, I will take you 
away at once: in any case, they shall not 





Old Love Stories Retold 
keep you long. Resign yourself for a short time 
to their will; mine is stronger; we shall conquer 
at last. And now, good-by for a little while." 

It was magnificent, but, indeed, it was not war; 
and what Lassalle failed to see was that the pride 
which thus prompted him so desperately to hazard 
not only his own but also Helene's happiness was 
in its essence as bourgeois as the pride he was 
fighting, was indeed identical. All that he could 
hope to accomplish was the wresting of an empty 
formality from a society whose conventions both 
himself and Helene professed to despise, a sanc- 
tion gained at the sword's point of which neither 
felt any need, an authority, in the opinion of both, 
obsolete and ridiculous. But such are the occa- 
sional paradoxes of the revolutionary. 

Can we wonder if in Helene's eyes her eagle 
moulted some feathers for this unlooked-for 
action, and that her love was set a-thinking ? 
Could he really love her and act so ? and if in- 
deed he loved her, her brain told her that he had 
made a mistake at a critical moment. Eagles 
among men should never make mistakes. Pos- 
sibly, too, her fine, feminine sense found some- 
[148] 







Ferdinand Lassalle 



Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 
thing underbred in this anxious assertion of pride 
in a situation where a truer pride would have 
disdained to measure itself with such vulgar 
standards. Some such half-formed thoughts 
may well have worked in Helene's mind, and con- 
tributed to the slackening of a will all too suscep- 
tible to varying influences and changes of mood; 
and soon she was to be a prisoner, cut off from 
the spiritual fount of her being, and instead daily 
and hourly breathing an atmosphere of her own 
doubts and her father's lies. 

Herr von Donniges was an opponent whose 
obstinacy and resource Lassalle had not counted 
with, and whose brutal and unscrupulous methods 
he could not have been expected to conceive. An 
ordinarily severe parent Lassalle might well have 
considered himself a match for; but Herr von 
Donniges was to display a barbarity, a ferocity, 
of disapproval which one does not expect to en- 
counter in a modern parent, however tyrannical, 
and he at once set about the subjugation of his 
disobedient daughter in the thoroughgoing spirit 
of a medieval baron. Lassalle had hardly left 
the house before this terrific parent appeared, 




Old Love Stories Retold 
li.il less, so to speak, with rage, and with 
a large knife in his hand. Seizing 
Helene by the hair, be dragged her home, 
and locked her in her room, the window 
of which lie nailed up with his own hand. 
Here she was kept close prisoner, her 
food was pushed in at the door, 
without her seeing who brought it, 
and her father threatened to shoot any 
one who should hold communication 
with her, or act as go-between for 
her and Lassalle. At short intervals, 
he would come, and ask her decision, 
always receiving the answer: " I shall 
marry Lassalle." 

Had Helene continued steadfast as 
she thus began, and opposed her father's 
bugaboo methods with quiet determina- 
tion, the story could only have ended 
one way. Disquieting and even alarm- 
ing as Herr von Donniges' fury might 
be, her common sense might have told 
her that it was mainly stage thunder, and 
that there was really nothing to fear, so 



Lassalle and TJelene von Donniges 
long ;i> she and Lassalle remained true 
to each ol her. 

After all, she was not really living in 
the Middle Ages, and her father knew 
quite well thai he could only fulfil his 
threats at the risk of his public position. 
Here was Lassalle's poinl of vantage, and 
lie losl no time in setting in motion tin- 
lii^li forces al hi> disposal for, revolu- 
tionary though he was, li<- was not with- 
out powerful friends. 

That he would have fulfilled bis boast, 
and forced Herr von Donniges to restore 
lii> daughter's freedom, there can be uo 
doubt. Alas! it was Helene herself who 
had made Iii> spirited tactics of no avail. 
Sparc does not permit of my following, 
step by step, the development of a struggle 
to which Herr von Donniges presently 
brought not only violence l*ut brilliant, 
unscrupulous cunning. On the side of 
the lovers it is a heartbreaking tragedy of 
errors and misunderstandings, compli- 
cated, too, with such cross-purposes as 



Old Love Stories Retold 

those of the Countess Hatzfeldt, whose jealousy of 

Helene is clearly seen to have been one of the cruel 

threads in the fatal web. Of course, the greatest 

danger of all in such a situation is that the lovers, 

cut off from direct communication, may lose 

faith in each other. At the best, love is a feeling 

childishly sensitive to doubts and fears. For 

the truest lovers separation is full of anxious 

disquiet. Time and Distance are evil fairies. 

They have been known to work sad mischief 

with the greatest passions. Who would dare 

answer for the love of another across say a year 

of separation and silence ? 

" Canst thou be true across so many miles — 
So many days that keep us still apart ? " 

What lover would dare to answer the question 
to his own heart with an affirmative ? 

Had Helene but kept her lover's parting 
words in mind, and done nothing but sit 
firm in quiet determination, awaiting her cer- 
tain deliverance, all would have been well; but, 
unfortunately, the fibres of her will all too soon 
relaxed; and, whatever she still felt in her heart, 
the threats of her father and the entreaties of her 
[152] 






Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 

sisters presently had their way with her. Not 
only did she promise to give up Lassalle, hut she 
set her name to letters to family friends announ- 
cing that determination, letters which her father 
had written for her to sign. She has pleaded 
intimidation as an excuse for this; hut, even when 
the opportunity was given to her of free speech 
with one of Lassalle's most powerful ambassa- 
dors, Colonel Riistow, and of transmitting through 
him a letter to Lassalle, she used it coldly to 
repudiate her lover. Herr von Donniges, 
with the specious diplomacy which char- 
acterized his clever management of the af- 
fair at this stage, had sought an interview 
with Colonel Riistow, for the purpose of 
convincing him that Helene was acting with 
her own free-will. Asked if Helene might 
receive and read for herself a letter from 
Lassalle, Herr von Donniges promptly agreed, 
and Helene, entering the room, left it to. read 
her letter. Soon she returned, and without 
a trace of emotion said to Colonel Riistow as she 
handed him a note: "Tell Herr Lassalle that I 
have read his letter; hut it makes no difference 

[ 1.5:} ] 




Old Love Stories Retold 
as regards the contents of the note I 
have just given you for him." 
This was the note: 

" Herr Lassalle : — 

" Having with all sincerity and with 
the deepest regret acknowledged my 
fault to my betrothed bridegroom, Yanko 
von Racowitza, and been comforted by 
his forgiveness and the assurance of his 
unchanged affection; having also in- 
formed your friend Holthoff of my de- 
cision before receiving his letter advising 
me to give you up, I now declare to you, 
of my own free-will, that a union with 
you is not to be thought of, that I con- 
sider myself released from my engage- 
ment to you, and that I am determined 
to devote my future life to my betrothed 
husband in true and faithful love. 

"Helene von Donniges." 

Though this may well have shaken 
Lassalle's faith in Helene, he refused to 
believe that it was written of her own 




Lassa/k and Helene von Dbnniges 
five-will — and, in fact, according to 
Helene's own statement later, the whole 
scene had been carefully planned by her 
father for the purpose of impressing 
Colonel Riistow. He himself had dic- 
tated the letter, and made her promise 
that in the event of Colonel Riistow bring- 
ing a letter from Lassalle, she was to 
leave the room, give it unread into the 
hands of Yanko von Racowitza, and re- 
turn, after a proper interval, with the 
previously prepared note. We cannot 
but feel that a nature so easily dominated 
was, after all, no true mate for Lassalle. 
A similar scene a few days later, still 
more diabolically conceived and callously 
acted, proved even too much for Lassalle's 
stubborn faith in her loyalty. Her letter 
had only moved him to fresh efforts. He 
had come so far as to win the assistance 
of the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 
Munich, who authorized an advocate, 
Doctor Haenle, to endeavor to arrange 
the affair amicably with Herr von Don- 





Old Love Stories Retold 
niges, and, if that proved impossible, to summon 
Helene before a notary to declare her decision in 
Lassalle's presence, and away from her father's 
influence. So little, for all her father's medieval 
methods, was there any need for Helene to fear 
them. She had not only Lassalle, but the law 
on her side — and yet, will it be believed, she 
declined in the presence of Doctor Haenle and 
Colonel Riistow the proffered chance of freedom. 
She would not go before a notary, and refused 
to meet Lassalle. 

" What good would it do ? " she said. " I know 
what he wants to say, and I am tired of the 
whole business." 

In addition, she spoke with incredible levity 
of Lassalle : " Lassalle likes to talk ; he would 
scarcely get through what he has to say in two 
hours," — and generally conducted the inter- 
view with such heartless frivolity that no wonder 
Lassalle's ambassadors went back to their friend, 
convinced that a woman who could talk so was 
utterly unworthy of him. And, certainly, though 
Helene was acting once more under intimidation, 
and, as she afterward explained, from a misunder- 

r 156 1 



Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 
standing of RUstow's and Haenle's relations to 
Lassalle (for her father kept her throughout 
ignorant of the chances in her favor, and she 
feared " false friends " of Lassalle among the 
dangers that surrounded her), yet it was surely 
unnecessary to play her part with such sincerity. 

Can we wonder that Lassalle's faith in Helene 
was unequal to this cruel blow ? At last he must 
agree with his friends. She was not worth the 
struggle. 

" I have given up the affair," he telegraphed 
Richard Wagner, who had stood his friend 
throughout, " on account of the utter unworthi- 
ness of the person. But thanks for kind inten- 
tions. Do nothing more. Lassalle." 

So he advised his other friends; and then, in 
his natural anger, he sent the following challenge 
to Helene's father: 

" Herr von Donniges: — 

" Having learned through the report of Colonel 

Riistow and Doctor Haenle that your daughter 

is a shameless hussy, and having therefore no 

intentions of dishonouring myself by marrying 

[157] 



Old Love Sto?ies Retold 

her, there is no longer any reason for 
withholding; a demand for satisfaction on 
account of the various insults which you 
have offered me. I therefore request 
you to make the necessary arrangements 
for a duel with my two friends by whom 
I send this message. 

"F. Lassalle." 



And it had been one of Lassalle' s cardinal 
principles never, under any circum- 
stances, to fight a duel! So had love 
enervated the strong thinker. 

Herr von Donniges refused to fight, 
and fled to Berne, but young Racowitza 
took on him to defend the family honour. 
Lassalle was known to be a fine shot, 
and Helene has since told us how she 
looked on Racowitza as already dead. 
She had already pictured his being car- 
ried to her home, and planned that in 
the confusion that would ensue she would 
steal out of the house — to Lassalle. 
Such was her weak and witless depend- 



Lassalle and Helene von Donniges 
ence on circumstances. But the issue 
was to be otherwise. At the first ex- 
change of shots, Lassalle was fatally 
wounded; and he died two days later — 
August .'51, 1864 — aged thirty-nine years 
and five months. He is buried in the 
Jewish cemetery at Breslau, and on the 
headstone is this short epitaph: 

"Here rests what was mortal of 
Ferdinand Lassalle, 
Thinker and Fighter." 

So a weak woman and a tyrannical 
father had brought to nothing one of the 
strongest personalities and the most valu- 
able intellects of the nineteenth century. 
So ended that stormy, starry wooing of 
that night in May; and surely there never 
was a story filled with more cruel reading, 
with so much pitiful matter of wantonly 
tangled complication, and, it would seem, 
easily avoidable tragic mistakes. Cer- 
tainly no story in the history of love more 
terribly illustrates the mad and criminal 
folly of arbitrary interference with that 





Old Love Stories Retold 
elemental instinct of human hearts. For not 
even Herr von Donniges achieved his end. The 
disgrace he feared came upon him tenfold. His 
daughter left him, Racowitza died a year or 
two after — though Helene had once more illus- 
trated her curious nature by becoming his wife. 
The Countess Hatzfeldt was heartbroken. Not 
a single actor in the story was happy — and all 
because society, in the person of Herr von Don- 
niges, wickedly, cruelly insisted on putting 
asunder two whom Nature had so manifestly 
joined together. 

Such is the revenge of a thwarted natural force 
— and such is the lesson society seems eternally 
incapable of learning. 



[160] 






VIII 

Abelard and Heloise 



"/ I ^HERE lived in Paris a young girl named 
Heloise." So Abelard in his autobio- 
graphical letter to an unknown, and possibly 
hypothetical friend, tells in one sentence, more 
eloquent even than his wonted eloquence 
of the schools, a whole history. He wrote in 
Latin, but it sounds prettier in his own lan- 
guage, as most tilings are apt to sound in 
French: " 77 crista it a Paris une jeunc pile 
nominee Heloise." Ah me! what long-lost joy, 
what ancient heart-break, are contained in that 
simple statement. 

Yet all would have been well — or not so well! 
— if there had not also lived in Paris at the same 
time a certain brilliant teacher of philosophy 
named Peter Abelard. 

The year was 1118 and Abelard not only lived 
in Paris, but in a real sense may almost be said 
[161] 





Old Love Stories Retold 

to have been one of its makers. As the 

walls of Thebes rose to music, Paris 

builded itself to the music of Abelard' s 

tongue: for on his lips, indeed, of all 

men, philosophy was not 

" Harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, 
But musical as in Apollo's lute." 

Think of the wonder of the teacher on 
the one hand, and the wonder of the 
student thirst for knowledge on the other, 
that between them could build a city — 
all out of enchanting speech and en- 
chanted hearing. For Paris literally be- 
gan that way. So many scholars flocked 
from all parts of Europe to listen to that 
nightingale of knowledge, that Paris, a 
mere embryo city when Abelard first 
came there, had to grow bigger and 
bigger to hold them. It seems fitting 
that our modern Alexandria should have 
been made out of learning and a love story. 
Abelard was a young nobleman from 
Pallet in Brittany, of an old family, and 
with much confidence in himself. Though 

yr 162 



Abe lard and Heloise 
the eldest son of his father, a man of con- 
siderable culture for his day, he early chose 
for himself the wandering pilgrimage of 
the scholar rather than that military way 
of life most affected by young men of his 
class. Wherever the reputation of some 
famous teacher drew him, he rambled, 
and of all his teachers, Jean Roscelin, 
Canon of Compiegne, was probably the 
earliest, as he was certainly the most in- 
fluential. From him il may well be that 
Abelard's natural bent towards taking the 
common-sense rationalistic view of the hair- 
splitting scholastic controversies of his day 
gained strength and direction; for Roscelin 
was a well-known champion of freedom of 
thought, and looked upon as anything but 
sound on the question of the Trinity. 

With a rationalistic temper of mind 
thus already well-formed, Abelard at 
length arrived in Paris, and put himself 
under the teaching of a scholar of a very dif- 
ferent type, the famous William of Cham- 
peaux, a brilliant pillar of orthodoxy. 



r 




Hi:s 





Old Love Stories Retold 
A certain philosophic controversy of supreme 
importance then, of supreme unimportance now, 
was agitating the learned world. We needn't 
pause even to state what it was. All that con- 
cerns us is that William of Champeaux cham- 
pioned the orthodox, logic-chopping side of the 
controversy, and that Abelard, by a sudden flash 
of his radiant common sense, won such a victory 
for the other side that the authority of his teacher 
was disastrously impaired, and his own reputation 
as a daring thinker and subtle dialectician made 
with a single blow. 

Abelard's success decided him to open a school 
of his own, and at Melun, some thirty miles from 
Paris, and presently at Corbeil, he began to draw 
the world of wandering scholars to his chair. 
Suddenly his health gave way, and seven years of 
exile in his country home followed. Meanwhile, 
William of Champeaux had delegated his chair 
to a substitute, and himself retired into the priory 
of Saint Victor. In his retirement, however, he 
gave lectures on rhetoric, which Abelard, on his 
return to Paris, cynically attended — to the 
further discomfiture of the teacher. So the 
[ 1(J4 1 



Abelard and Hcloise 

battle between the rival teachers went on. With 
its details we need not here concern ourselves. 
Suffice it that, at length, in the year 1118, after 
various twists and turns of the scholastic conflict, 
Abelard found himself firmly seated in William 
of Champeaux's long-coveted chair of the Episco- 
pal school, under the shadow of Notre Dame. 
Soon there were some five thousand students, ;i 
motley picturesque crowd indeed, thronging Paris 
just to hear Abelard talk. " It has been esti- 
mated," says his most recent and most luminous 
biographer, " that a pope, nineteen cardinals, and 
more than fifty archbishops and bishops were at 
one time among his pupils." The handsome, 
brilliant, and somewhat worldly young teacher 
was the idol of the city, and Heloise, in a passage 
of her letters pathetic with womanly worship, 
recalls how the women used to run to see him as 
he passed from his lodging on the hill of Ste. 
Genevieve (now the Latin Quarter and the scene 
of the greatest of his earlier triumphs) to the 
schools. "Who was there," she cries, ''that did 
not hasten to observe when you went abroad, 
and did not follow you with strained neck and 

r 165 1 





Old Love Stories Retold 
staring eyes as you passed along ? What 
wife, what virgin, did not burn ? What 
queen or noble dame did not envy my 
fortune ? " 

In 1118 Abelard was in his thirty-ninth 
year, and at the height of his fame. The 
intoxication of fulfilled ambition and 
personal popularity was his daily and 
hourly drink. Wealth as well as fame 
was his, but so far he had not known 
love. 

Now Abelard, by rumour of her rare 
gifts and graces, and unusual accom- 
plishments of learning, had by this time 
become aware that il e.vistait a Paris une 
jeune file nominee Heloise, and, by his 
own confession, he presently set himself 
to win her love. Heloise lived with her 
" uncle " — gossip tongues said her father 
— Fulbert, a canon of Paris. Abelard 
found himself in need of a new lodging, 
and Fulbert was glad to welcome so dis- 
tinguished a boarder. It is not difficult 
to imagine the excitement in the heart of 



Abelard and Heloise 
Heloise. For it hud been arranged that 
Abelard should partly repay Fulbert for 
his hospitality by giving various learned 
lessons to his niece. Heloise was but 
seventeen or eighteen — so much a child 
(though, indeed, she had been brought 
up by the somewhat worldly nuns of 
Argenteuil — a fact not to be forgotten in 
Abelard' s defence) that her guardian gave 
Abelard permission to chastise her if she 
neglected her lessons ! 

Neither seem to have entirely neglected 
their lessons, for it is probable that He- 
loise's knowledge of Greek and Hebrew 
came from Abelard, who also instructed 
her in theology and dialectics. But soon, 
as with Paolo and Francesca, the books 
were forgotten, and Abelard confesses that 
before long there were " more kisses than 
theses," and that "love was the inspifer 
of his tongue." Yet, if the books were 
temporarily forgotten, they were not 
merely "love's purveyors," for this love 
of Abelard and Heloise was one of those 



n 





<r 



Old Love Stories Retold 
rare loves in which the rapture of union is not 
merely in the heart, but in the brain. Each could 
say to the other, as Robert Browning wrote to 
Elizabeth Browning — " Where the heart is, let 
the brain lie also." Theirs was that keen, com- 
plete love which unites the spirit and the senses 
and the intellect in an ecstasy which no tongue, 
not even Abelard's, can tell. 

But, if Abelard did not entirely neglect the 
mental training of his beloved pupil, she was 
soon the only pupil to whom he paid any regard; 
too soon his love for her so completely possessed 
him that he half forgot his lecture-room and the 
five thousand pilgrim scholars, and, when he 
did lecture, lectured in a weary, unprepared fashion 
very unlike the old spirited way which had won 
him his fame. But, if his lectures were dis- 
appointing, there were soon love songs of his 
making on all the singing lips of Paris; and every 
one knew what and who it was that had wrought 
this change in the master. Every one, for a long 
time, except — Fulbert ; and then at last Fulbert 
too. With Fulbert's discovery of the attach- 
ment, Abelard and Heloise ceased to live under 
[168] 



Abe hi r d and Heloise 

the same roof. The happy lessons violently 
ceased, and the lovers might only meet rarely 
and with difficulty. As usual, however, the 
guardian had made his discovery too late, and 
there came a day when Heloise realized that she 
was soon to become a mother, and wrote telling 
Abelard the wonderful news - " with transports 
of joy." It is necessary to emphasize Heloise's 
attitude in presence of a contingency which most 
women would naturally, and necessarily, regard 
as tragic, as it is characteristic of her part — so 
much the nobler part — in the whole story. 
What was she to do ? she asked. Abelard's 
answer was to take her one night, during Fulbert's 
absence, to his home at Pallet, where, under his 
sister's care, she, in due course, gave birth to a 
boy, to whom the parents gave the name of 
'Astrolabe" — a name which bears curious wit- 
ness to that love of learning which had meant so 
much in bringing them together. 

Fulbert's rage at these circumstances may be 

judged too well from his subsequent action. To 

appease it Abelard at length proposed marriage 

with Heloise, though it is impossible to say that 

[169] 




Old Love Stories Retold 
the form of his proposal, as reported by 
himself, raises him in one's esteem. He 
had done nothing, he urged, that need 
surprise anyone who understood the 
violence of love and knew into what 
abysses, since the beginning of the world, 
women had hurled the greatest of men ! 

Remembering his own earlier state- 
ment that he had deliberately sought 
the love of Heloise, he was hardly in a 
position to make this oldest and meanest 
of all masculine pleas — the woman 
tempted me! Still, he was willing to 
make a reparation which, he quaintly 
says, went beyond anything Fulbert 
could have hoped! He would marry 
Heloise — on condition that the marriage 
was kept a secret. For, you see, Heloise 
knew but one love — the love of Abelard ; 
Abelard loved two, and I fear that for 
him Ambition was the greater of the two. 
Think of a man who loved a woman 
considering, at such a crisis of their lives, 
and at a moment when even an evident 



Abelard and Heloise 
duty might be expected to appear attrac- 
tive — think of him coldly thinking of his 
"reputation."" "I proposed to him," 
says he, " to marry her whom I had se- 
duced, on the sole condition that the mar- 
riage was to be kept secret, so that it 
should not injure my reputation!" 

If, as I have said before, the love of 
Dante and Beatrice was entirely the love 
of Dante, it is surely equally certain that 
the love of Abelard and Heloise was 
mainly the love of Heloise. It is a hu- 
miliating comment on Abelard to hear how 
differently Heloise took the situation. 
With all her womanly eloquence, backed 
by no end of learned authority, she 
pleaded with him — not to marry her! 
What odium the marriage would bring 
upon the Church. What tears it would 
cost philosophy! Think, too, how de- 
plorable for a man whom nature had 
created for the whole world thus to be 
enslaved by a woman and bent under a 
dishonourable yoke! 



Old Love Stories Retold 
Reasoning all too much after Abelard's own 
heart ! — but all the same the marriage really 
took place. Leaving little Astrolabe with Abe- 
lard's sister at Pallet, the two lovers returned to 
Paris, and after a night of vigil in a church, were 
married, on a certain dawn, in presence of Fulbert 
and many friends of both parties. At the church 
door they separated, Abelard going his way, 
Heloise hers. For the world was not to know! 
However, according to Abelard, Fulbert was 
determined that it should — and can we blame 
him ! — and, in consequence of his various loud 
whispers, Abelard had Heloise secretly conveyed 
to her old convent of Argenteuil, near Paris, 
where, without taking the veil, she was to live the 
life of a nun. 

This act of Abelard's was misunderstood, 
wilfully maybe, by Fulbert, who professed to 
regard it as a first step to Abelard's annulment 
of the marriage, in the interests of his ecclesiasti- 
cal ambitions — for this natural enemy of priests 
and priestly sophistry appears really to have had 
his heart set upon church preferment, after all. 
Acting on this, possible, misconception, Fulbert 
[172] 



Abe lani and Heloise 
took his terrible historic revenge upon Abelard; 
and Abelard and Heloise saw each other no more 
for many years. Beside himself with rage and 
shame, it was not unnatural that Abelard — 
selfish as it actually was of him — should com- 
mand Heloise to consummate her uncompleted 
vows, and take the veil in earnest. This she did, 
her warm human heart protesting, ;is it still re- 
mained warm enough to protest after years of 
monastic life, and, who can doubt that reads her 
wonderful letters, protested to the end. 

Abelard' s life in the long interval belongs rather 
to the literature of theology than to the literature 
of love. Though the rich human spring in him 
which had given that worldly charm to his lec- 
tures, and turned a philosopher into a troubadour, 
was for ever dried up; and though, indeed, he 
.was soon to wither to an asceticism which re- 
garded his love for Heloise as a sinful lust of the 
flesh, yet his head retained enough of its vital 
originality to keep him still and always a pioneer 
of honest thinking, and, therefore, a rebel in the 
eyes of the church. Today Ahelard's heresies 
have become a part of official Christian doctrines, 
[ 173 ] 









-r 



T 




Old hove Stories Retold 
as is the way with any heresies whatso- 
ever; but several centuries have gone by 
in the interval, and the way of the honest 
thinker is easier to-day — if he is careful 
to choose his subjects! Though Abelard 
grew more and more of an ascetic 
moralist, he does not appear to have lost 
his courage as a masculine thinker, and, 
as long as he lived, he was ever ready to 
take the perilous chances of truth. This, 
necessarily, made his life eventful, and 
even stormy, for the next few years, and 
finally drove him into a sort of exile, 
resulting in the foundation of that lonely 
little monastery, in the valley of Arduzon, 
the name of which, the Paraclete, is so 
consecrated to romance. Once more 
the old miracle of his silver speech took 
place. Distant and almost uninhabitable 
as was the valley where, with a brother 
or two, he had taken up his exile, though, 
as he tells us, you had to build your 
rough cabin for yourself, and had to be 
content with moss and mud to lie on, 






A be lard anil Heloise 
and the grassy hank to eat from, still the 
pilgrim audience somehow found its way, 
as inevitably the sleuth-hounds of heresy 
found theirs also. For there is no spot 
on the earth, however lonely, where it is 
absolutely safe to tell the truth. It was 
that popular and industrious Saint Ber- 
nard of Clairvaux that this time made 
things uncomfortable for Abelard; and 
with that usual luck of his, which seemed 
to make every change in his life for the 
worse, Abelard accepted an invitation to 
preside over the Abbey of St. Gildas at 
Rhuvs in Brittany. The Abbey of St. 
Gildas was rich and worldly, and it is 
more than likely that the good monks had 
been attracted to Abelard rather by the 
"heterodoxy of his reputation than by his 
piety. Their disappointment was to be 
keen and bitter, for how different was this 
austere, atrophied Abelard to the gay 
monk of the world they had looked for- 
ward to see. Nor were they long in ex- 
pressing their disappointment. Soon 




Old Love Stories Retold 
they were violently to oppose his authority and 
even to drop poison into his food. 

Abelard had been abbot of Saint Gildas but 
three or four years when news came to him that 
Heloise was in trouble too. The nuns of Ar- 
genteuil, of which monastery she had been prioress, 
had been turned out of their home, owing more 
to the ecclesiastical avarice of the Abbot Suger 
of St. Denis — who fished up an old document 
to prove that Argenteuil really belonged to the 
monastery of St. Denis — than to the probably ex- 
aggerated accounts of the worldliness of the nuns. 
On hearing this news, Abelard transferred the 
Paraclete, still his property, into Heloise's keep- 
ing, and, within a year or two, the nunnery thus 
founded became one of the most famous in the 
kingdom, respected, and, as we would say, 
fashionable. The goodness and high-minded- 
ness of Heloise are as apparent in her success as 
is her charm. Nobles and prelates smiled gifts 
upon her little abbey, and noble ladies anxious 
to take the veil thought first of the Paraclete. 
Well might a world-weary, perhaps love-thwarted, 
girl seek out such a spiritual mother; for, good 

r 1761 



Abelard and Heloise 

and pure and spiritual as Heloise was, her letters 
tell us that the spring of an undying love still 
kept her nature sweet and sympathetic to the 
human needs. A young monk seeking Abelard 
would indeed have made no such happy choice 
of spiritual director. Ask the monks of St. 
Gildas ! These perhaps over-human fathers seem 
at length to have so violently resisted Abelard's 
stern purpose to reform them, as to have driven 
him from the Abbey in very fear for his life; 
though it must not he forgotten that in the midsl 
of all these various "calamities" of which pres- 
ently he was so feelingly to write, Abelard still 
remained Abbot of St. Gildas, and enjoyed an 
abbot's revenue. The monks, however, found it 
possible still to make his life a burden, and his 
calumniators were not slow to take their side 
against him One day, sick at heart, and ap- 
parently anxious to tell his own truth about him- 
self, Abelard sat down and wrote to an unknown 
friend "The Story of my Calamities," a document 
of the first importance to our understanding of 
his nature, but more important still, because, 
accidentally being read by Heloise in her quiet 
[177] 







Old Love Stories Retold 
nunnery, it prompted her to write the 
first of her beautiful heartfelt letters: 
"To her lord, yea, father; to her spouse, 
yea, brother; from his servant, yea, 
daughter — his wife, his sister; to Abe- 
lard from Heloise." His spiritual daugh- 
ters, the good sisters of the Paraclete, — 
" they who have given themselves to God 
in the person of her who has given her- 
self exclusively to thee," — were alarmed 
to hear such news of him, and begffed 
that he would write to ease their anxious 
hearts. " A letter would cost thee so 
little," cried Heloise reproachfully, and 
quotes Seneca on the epistolary duties 
of friends. In the interval between 
Abelard's making over the Paraclete to 
Heloise, and the writing of " The Story 
of my Calamities," he had paid many 
visits to her abbey, very strictly in the 
character of her spiritual patron and 
director. The tongues of the world 
wagged over these visits, but we have 
only to read Abelard's " dusty answers " 




Abe lard and Heloise 
to Heloise's letters to realize that the 
world was all too wrong. The Abelard 
that had taught Heloise her Greek and 
Hebrew, and floated love-songs through 
the lattice to the ears of an eaves-drop- 
ping Paris, was dead. He was now a 
serious doctor of divinity, with a strong 
leaning towards asceticism. The old 
warm-blooded, angel-eyed dream that 
Heloise could still write of with stirring 
bosom, after so many years, and still re- 
gard — for all her ecclesiastical diginity — 
as the crown of her woman's life, was for 
poor Abelard a folly and a foulness. To 
her burning words he answered with dry 
counsels of perfection — in letters which, 
from the human point of view, are the 
most pitiful things in literature. 

But, on the other hand, where in litera- 
ture has a woman so daringly laid bare 
her heart with so splendid and so pure a 
shamelessness ! When we consider, too, 
the time in which she lived, all the dis- 
abilities under which a woman eager to 




Old Love Stories Retold 
" utter all herself upon the air " must have 
laboured, the courage of such an emotional sin- 
cerity constitutes an achievement before which 
Abelard's intellectual audacities seem mere col- 
lege triumphs. Ah, listen how this twelfth cen- 
tury abbess dared to love: 

" ... All your wishes I have blindly fulfilled, 
even to the point that, not being able to bring 
myself to offer you the least resistance, I have 
had the courage, on a word from you, to lose 
myself. I have done still more : ah ! — strange 
indeed — my love has turned to such madness 
that it has sacrificed, without hope of ever re- 
covering it, that which was the one object of its 
desire; at your command, I have, with a new 
habit, taken another heart, just to show you that 
you are as much the only master of my heart as 
of my body. Never, God is my witness, have I 
ever sought from you anything but just yourself; 
it is you only, and not your possessions, that I 
love. I have never given a thought either to any 
questions of marriage or marriage dower, or in- 
deed to any joys or wishes of my own. It has 
been yours alone, as you well know, that I have 
[180] 



Abelard and Heloise 

had at heart. Although the name of wife ap- 
pears more sacred and more binding, I myself 
would have liked better the name of mistress, or 
even — let us say it — that of concubine or 
courtesan: in the thought that the more I humbled 
myself for you, the more I should win the right 
to your good graces, and the less impaired the 
glorious renown of your genius. 

"You yourself in writing that letter of consola- 
tion to a friend have not entirely forgotten these 
sentiments of mine. You have not disdained to 
recall some of those reasons for which I did my 
best to dissuade you from our fatal marriage, but 
you have passed over in silence almost all those 
which made me prefer love to marriage, liberty 
to a chain. I take God to witness that if Augus- 
tus, master of the world, had deemed me worthy 
of the honour of his alliance, and assured me of 
the Empire of the universe for ever, the name of 
courtesan with thee would have seemed sweeter 
and nobler than the name of empress with him; 
for it is not riches, not power, that makes great- 
ness: riches and power arc things of fortune; 
greatness depends upon merit." 
[181] 






Old Love Stories Retold 
Abelard has his place in the history 
of philosophy, but his name would hardly 
have attained its familiarity on the lips 
of men, had it not been for his love story, 
and the real love in the story was that of 
Heloise. For such a love the history of 
love has but few parallels, and what pic- 
ture could be more dramatically poign- 
ant than that with which the story 
closes. At last, all his battles fought, 
Abelard came to die, and Heloise, by 
connivance of a friendly abbot, con- 
trived that his body should be brought 
in secret to the Paraclete. The Abbot 
of Cluny deserves well of romance for 
that good deed. Heloise survived Abe- 
lard twenty-one years, and much of that 
time she must have watched over his 
sleep in that quiet chapel in the lonely 
valley of Arduzon. Surely no love story 
in the world has a more touching end 
than this, an end more picturesque in 
its pathos. As time passed, that vigil 
must have grown less and less the vigil 




182 




Abttard and Heloise 

of a wife's heartbreak, and more and more 
the vigil of a mother over the sleep of her 
tired child. For a woman's love is always 
a mother's love — most of all, perhaps, 
the love for her husband. 

A pretty story tells that when Heloise 
died she was buried in the same tomb as 
her husband, and that the dead man 
opened wide his arms to receive her. 
Certain it seems that the ashes of the two 
lovers were, at one time or another, 
mingled, and that Abelard and Heloise 
now rest together in Pere La Chaise. 






183 




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